[fedora-astronomy] Introductions
Marek Mahut
mmahut at fedoraproject.org
Wed Jan 2 09:45:08 UTC 2008
Hello Lamar,
Lamar Owen wrote:
> Good morning, and an early Happy New Year to everyone.
>
> I first learned of this SIG Saturday; very cool. I have downloaded and have
> read the archives of the mailing list (nothing like getting a little history,
> even if that isn't but a month long) and I plan on attending the meeting on
> the 11th, unless something work related comes up.
>
> By way of introductions, I am CIO at the Pisgah Astronomical Research
> Institute (PARI), which is one of the few observatories with both optical and
> radio capabilities.
Wow, happy to see you here! :)
> We currently have several optical instruments, from a pair of solar telescopes
> with Ethernet video webcams to a 16 inch DFM with an Apogee Ethernet CCD, and
> we have four dish-type radio instruments: two 26 meter X-Y mounted prime
> focus parabolics good up to 12-14GHz; a 12.2 meter prime focus parabolic
> good to 26-30GHz; and a 4.6 meter prime focus parabolic good up to the low
> millimeter range. We also have a few HF arrays for use with the Radio Jove
> program, observing the sun and Jupiter in the 20-28 MHz band. We also host
> another radio instrument from Virginia Tech; see
> http://www.ece.vt.edu/swe/eta/ for lots and lots of details on this exciting
> instrument.
>
> The 12.2 meter is in need of major work, and is mothballed pending funding.
>
> The two 26 meter telescopes are in the midst of drive and feed upgrades; DFM
> Engineering is performing the drive upgrades (this is the second drive
> upgrade on these telescopes that they've done for us; this gets us 27 bit
> absolute encoders and Ethernet connectivity for control and telemetry); the
> feeds are being upgraded to thermally stabilized dual, coaxial 2.4GHz and
> 8.5GHz for extreme scattering event research as an interferometer, funded
> through an NSF MRI grant. Also, PARI is collaborating with Furman University
> Astronomer Dr. David Moffett on pulsar monitoring research in the 318MHz
> band; the instrument is currently off-line, but the pulsar radiometer backend
> is on Linux (currently an older Fedora).
>
> The 4.6 meter Andrew parabolic is in active use for our School of Galactic
> Radio Astronomy educational program, and has a 1.42GHz hydrogen RF chain and
> spectrometer. This telescope is currently internet controllable through a
> Java applet in-browser (the applet doesn't work with the F8 java stack,
> unfortunately), and with a custom java servlet backend. The SGRA program
> teaches middle school teachers how run the telescope remotely, how to perform
> doppler spectroscopy to determine the galactic rotational characteristics,
> and how to teach their classes how to do this. The telescope has a smiley
> face painted on it (long story), so it is nicknamed 'Smiley' for obvious
> reasons.
Is the java applet available somewhere? I'm wondering why it's not
working with IcedTea java.
> Smiley also gets used for solar astronomy at 1.4GHz (we have a program, called
> Space Science Lab, that teaches high school sophomores and juniors, in a one
> week on-site seminar setting, all about solar astronomy, from optical all the
> way down to 20MHz radio, and Smiley is a part of that. In the SSL program,
> the students spend one week on site, learning astronomy, radio astronomy,
> basic electronics, soldering, troubleshooting, etc: they build a Radio Jove
> kit radiometer, and if they don't have their own PC, we give them one with
> the require software preloaded; out of 57 kits attempted at this point, 56
> have been successfully constructed within the one week seminar; the 57th kit
> had a bad PC board).
>
> We have a number of other programs; you can see the breadth of them on our
> website at www.pari.edu
That's a nice gear. I hope to have chance visit your institute if I'm
around someday. :)
> Personally, I have run Red Hat and Fedora Linux since Red Hat Linux 4.1 in
> 1997. I was the PostgreSQL Global Development Group's RPM maintainer from
> 1999 through 2004 (my base spec file is still in RHEL4), when I passed the
> maintainership to Devrim Gunduz, as personal reasons prevented me from doing
> the builds in a timely fashion at that time. Since then, of course,
> automated buildsystems have come of age, and packaging is a much simpler
> process than it was then.
:)
> On the subject of packages, I see in the rejected packages list IRAF. Getting
> permission from UCAR to distribute NCAR as a part of Fedora would be killer,
> as IRAF is de rigeur for optical astronomy. For radio astronomy, getting the
> former AIPS and AIPS++ packages, as well as the currently maintained CASA
> packages, in Fedora would be killer, as that is pretty much required for
> single dish and interferometer imagery in radio astronomy.
Regarding Iraf, x11iraf is under review,
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=249614
Since one month I'm trying to contact Mr. Romanovski, which after years
of studies in US, is back in Russia.
> Also, GNUradio has an astronomy section; with a Universal Software Radio
> Peripheral (USRP) with a DBRX daughterboard, and a medium-sized dish (2-4
> meters) useful 1.4GHz radio astronomy can be done. GNUradio requires wx, and
> the radio astronomy examples require PyEphem; getting PyEphem in Fedora would
> be great in general for astronomy, as PyEphem does all the interesting
> calculations, including the absolutely required (for radio astronomy) local
> standard of rest. Having GNUradio packages (it's in Debian already) would be
> great (I might be able to do these if no one else does them).
PyEphem and GNU Radio are on our wish list as well and I hope I'll
package it.
If someone is interesting in packaging GNU/Radio, Trond's spec file is
available at http://trondd.fedorapeople.org/spec_files/.
> In any case, it's great to see this SIG form, and I look forward to being able
> to help in some fashion. I see several names I recognize here; Jef, spot, in
> particular. We use Aurora Linux on a couple of our backends, running on an
> E6500 and E5500 Sun Enterprise pair.
Please, don't hesitate to come to our next meeting, so we can discuss
what Fedora do for pari.edu.
--
Marek Mahut https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Astronomy/
Fedora Project http://www.jamendo.com/
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