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Is There Software to Create Images of the Sky with an Amateur Radio Telescope?

-- | July 10, 2016

Question: Hello, I was looking to see what the NRAO recommended for amateur radio astronomers (I already know about websites like The Society for Amateur Radio Astronomers http://www.radio-astronomy.org/) I was more interested in a equipment/software setup that would allow for creating radio images. For example, I know about the NRAO’s AIPS software, etc. But for example, if I were to make a simple aluminum receiver dish, horn, etc. Do you know of any software that would be able to take the datasets and produce an image? I have a Orion Atlas Equatorial mount that I use for visual astronomy (CCD, etc.) And was thinking of attaching a dish to the mount, but I was not sure of any software out there that could be used to “scan” a grid section of the sky, while still tracking the overall movement due to earth’s rotation. Any knowledge you can provide is greatly appreciated. Thank you. — Matt

Answer: Since there are sidereal motion trackers (devices that you can attach to a telescope mount to track a position on the sky and compensate for the Earth’s rotation), the tricky part of this is the scanning capability. I am not aware of software or instrumentation that can do this on an amateur telescope. That said, if you have a radio telescope antenna you can steer the antenna position on the sky by-hand and log the recordings as a function of position on the sky for latter gridding. From these measurements you could create a contour plot of the radiometric intensity toward a position on the sky. You could do this with a simple two-dimensional graph of the intensities (no special software required).

Jeff Mangum

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