It has been cloudy for weeks so I've been working on something that would allow me to make astronomical observations regardless of sky quality.
I built a radio telescope based on a raspberry pi and RTLSDR dongle. The antenna is made from a wifi grid reflector and a cantenna tuned for 1.4 Ghz. I'm using a Nooelec Sawbird+ H1 LNA and RTLSDR V3 dongle.
To collect the data I use the H-line-software by Victor Boesen. That software can be found
here.This is the first light for this telescope. I simply pointed it straight up and collected 100,000 FFTs every time the sky drifted 5 degrees.
The graph indicates relative power and shows the Doppler shift of that signal. Blue shifted signal indicates relative motion toward the hydrogen.
Around 70° RA with the scope pointed into Cygnus you can see a single blue shifted peak indicating close proximity to a large cloud of hydrogen gas, likely our own Orion spur where our solar system is situated.
When we drift to around 300° RA with the scope pointed into Auriga you can see a peak and trough then another very slight peak indicating the banded structure of our galaxy. The largest peak being our own Orion spur again and the second being the Perseus arm of the Milky way.
I plan to continue making drift scans at different declinations and compiling the observations into a single map.
Next time I'll try setting a fixed range for the graph to stabilize the gif a bit.
I've also added a few pictures of the telescope as revisions to the gif.
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