> Begin forwarded message: > > > Carl and Alan, > > I need some advice from old salts about how to demonstrate radio astronomy > observing techniques to new graduate students. > > We are paying some attention to the 6m telescope on the roof of the EE > building at Caltech and are trying to make it into a good teaching > instrument. The front-end covers 1.3 to 1.7 GHz with about 100K Tsys on two > linear polarizations and we recently installed a Roach 1 spectrometer with > two 500 MHz bandwidth channels and 60 kHz resolution. There is much RFI and > a lesson we want to teach is how to work around it. > > Our weakest link is the software to integrate telescope pointing with > receiver output. We are working on developing a convenient system but I > wonder if it already exists on other small telescopes. Do you have any > suggestions for integrated telescope and data taking control system we > should look at? > > A second topic is what to observe with the telescope as educational > demonstrations. We can certainly map galactic hydrogen and look at the > stronger continuum sources. The spectrometer can cross correlate the two > linear polarizations and we could get into polarization measurements. Do you > have suggestion for observations? > > I would like to observe OH (again, since I have not observed it or followed > what has been done since 1963 !). Where is a good summary of the > observations? I think our 60 KHz resolution is too broad and we will need > to improve it by a factor of 10 or more. > > Sandy
