In the previous article, I describe a low noise amplifier for the 21cm band. Today I want to show you a construction of the dish antenna where this amplifier was used.
Category: Astro tools
Low noise and low cost amplifier for radio astronomy, 21 cm band
21 cm band, also known as the Hydrogen line, is one of the important bands in radio astronomy. Please read this Wikipedia article if you not familiar with the Hydrogen line. Nowadays, even radio amateurs can observe this signal from outer space, thanks to modern hardware. One of the most important parts of any receiver is the antenna and input…
Powerful DC motor driver using IR2110
To control the DC motor’s speed and rotation direction, we need some motor driver. One of the most popular schematics is H-Bridge. For the low current and voltages, we can use some integral solutions like L293D and so on. But if we need more power and reliability, we have to build some custom H-bridge using Mosfet transistors. This type of…
Autonomous Allsky camera with Raspberry PI. Part 3: shooting night sky in FITS using QHY5-IIM camera
This is the third part of the Allsky cycle. Please read previous articles to get complete information about this project: Part 1. Autonomous Allsky camera with Raspberry PI: an overview. Part 2. Autonomous Allsky camera with Raspberry PI: powering and lightning protection This time I will show my utility and script for shooting the night sky and processing the images.
Converting DSLR RAW images into scientific FITS format. Part 2: working with LIBRAW
In the previous article, I’m started to describe my Raw2Fits converter. It was a brief note about GTK user interface development. Now I want to talk about the LibRaw library. This is a great library for reading RAW files from digital photo cameras (CRW/CR2, NEF, RAF, DNG, and others). Take a look at the LibRaw project web page and official…
Autonomous Allsky camera with Raspberry PI. Part 2: powering and lightning protection
This is the second part of the Allsky cycle, and I want to describe powering and protection of this device. Please read the first part to get basic information about this project.
Autonomous Allsky camera with Raspberry PI. Part 1: overview.
Allsky (or weather) camera is one of the most important parts of the modern observatory. It’s important to monitor sky conditions during night observations, especially when the observatory is remote controlled or fully automatic. Different vendors provide different solutions. But all they are share the same problems: very high prices, lack of autonomy (PC is required), and lack of useful…
Isolated eqmod adapter for the telescope control
There are popular and quite cheap amateur telescope mounts from different vendors: Sky-Watcher, Celestron, etc. Most of those mounts contain motors and some controller schematic. Users can control these devices in different ways. One way is to use the mount’s hand controller. Another way is to connect to the computer and use some software to control and guide the telescope.…
Converting DSLR RAW images into scientific FITS format. Part 1: UI
FITS is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storing, transmitting, and processing scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata. (Wikipedia…