On Saturday, August 23, we’re hosting our first Wow@Home star party with optical and radio telescopes for local amateur astronomers. We invite others to celebrate by organizing their own star party at home or with their local astronomy group.
by HabitabilityLab
2 Comments
I mean, it looks like a great idea and something I’d lump into.
But where are the details of the required hardware? It doesn’t go into any detail and doesn’t look like they know exactly what you need right now.
The only mention is in the integrated caption to a single image of the Nooelec Mesh Antenna (£200), and Nooelec Sawbird+H1 (£42), with (presumably) a Nooelec RTL-SDR (another £40, but which I have several of).
So it’s not really as easy as setting up satellite TV, and not really “affordable” as that’s nearly £300 of dedicated hardware to me not counting actually getting it all working and dedicating a machine to the task (e.g. is an RPi 4 or 5 not able to do the required processing, because I do a LOT of SDR processing with those).
It needs more details before I can dedicate time to looking at it, far more details in fact, especially for an amateur crowdsourced data project. Even the link to EZRA runs off into hours of YouTube videos which is not something I’d be willing to churn through without instead going off and finding someone who’s boiled it down to what I need.
As an amateur astronomer, a heavy user of SDR for a number of applications, someone who lives in one of the best dark-skies parts of my country (though presumably with radio astronomy that’s not such a huge deal even if it does help a little), someone who’s highly techy and has a lot of spare computer equipment lying around… I can’t help but wonder quite how much work and expense it would be for me to lump into this project, which is probably quite telling about how many users it’ll get on board at the moment.
GTFO with this advertising.
Extra characters. Extra characters.