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This idea is either brilliant or stupid, and I'm going
with brilliant. |
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If standard satellite dishes won't do it, maybe radio-
astronomers could sponsor custom dishes which will
give satellite reception and pick up Saggitarius Eta in
their spare time. |
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Maybe [bigsleep] was alluding to this, but to use these as a telescope you'd have to aim them. Currently they are all focused on satellites in geosyncronous orbit. Anything farther away than that will be completely out of focus when you try to combine the data from all these dishes. |
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If you added an aiming mechanism, they might be made to be dual-purpose. Perhaps you could take advantage of that tracking capability to provide TV, phone, and internet through satellites in a lower orbit. Of course if you have internet through a satellite, you won't be able to upload data when your dish is pointed at the stars. |
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Why not just put your array on Vesta ? No atmosphere, much less RF interference, cheap real estate prices ... |
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Not even much of a commute, but you can just beam the data back to Earth for analysis. |
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//to use these as a telescope you'd have to aim
them// |
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I dunno. I have this gut feeling that, given enough
dishes, there'd be some way to recover something
from them. For one thing, diffractive optics let you
"see" in directions you're not actually looking in. |
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yeah I think an aiming mechanism of some sort would be necessary, otherwise you wouldn't get any parallax, all the dishes would (still) be converging on the satellites. |
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//you wouldn't get any parallax// Wouldn't you get
plenty of parallax at distances greater than that of
the satellites? |
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I believe there are several of these on the HB (see
link) and it is baked, to boot -- see annotations
within linked idea. [marked-for-deletion] redundant,
sorry |
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No [m-f-d]. The idea is original. Sure distributed arrays are baked and amature ones are halfbaked, but this idea is about reusing something that is installed already on millions of houses. Maybe the amateur telescope array is also made up of telescopes that people already owned, but most of those were probably already interested in astronomy. Like the SETI at home project, if this could work, and it didn't cost people any additional money to set up, I bet you'd get a lot of people who aren't normally that intereted in radio telescopes to hook up their dish to help out. |
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//parallax// How ? none of the dishes would be pointing in the same direction. |
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So ok - all of the dishes are focused at a fixed distance in (I think at points along geostationary orbit), the directions are different, they are tuned to pick up particular wavelengths-wavelengths which are flooded with actual satellite signals. But there a lot them-and we could with if addition of a gps signal pinpoint the locations of each accurately. Is there something useful to astronomy in this soup we could still pick out ? After all Batman managed to find the joker with just all the mobile phones in gotham. . . |
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Sorry, while using the antenna dish as a radio
telescope is certainly a clever idea, it's not new (see
link). Once it is a telescope, putting it into an array,
is not new either. |
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Also-is it not possible to infer the direction of any one particular dish electronically? Can we detect the phase of the signals from the actual satellite signals? Could that be used somehow-also do we know the exact position of the satellites-and could that information also be useful? |
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@theircompetitor great link. So the principle of reconfiguring a single satellite dish into an astronomical instrument is baked, as is the idea of ganging up multiple astronomical instruments to make a larger one. So the last piece of the pie (in if sky if you will) is the crowd-sourcing element . . . . So i'm asserting that the idea here is really the 'thingy' that needs to be designed and built and accompanying network to make it work. Theoritically - what could we do with the millions (citation needed) of existing satellite dishes that we cant already do. . . ? |
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Fixed dishes which only point at one satellite, can still be used as 'spotters' for the main array given that there's so many of them. For that you'd need the GPS coordinates of the installation. |
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GPS coordinates are reasonably easy to find... look up the street address - automatable. |
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Knowing how the mechanism that moves the dish around stores its information (standard for each model), combined with what setting is used to point it at satellites x and y, gives you the ability to point any particular dish where you want it - also automatable. |
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So the individual owner fills out a form giving street address of the installation and the brand/model# of the receiver. |
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Even fixed-dishes (which can't move around) can be used as rough spotters for whichever area of the sky they happen to be pointed at. |
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