Everyday Radio Telescope

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, portable radio telescope for educational purposes, enabling students to measure solar brightness, detect celestial sources, and analyze radio signals using accessible equipment and open-source software.

Contribution

It introduces an affordable, easy-to-assemble radio telescope setup with a data pipeline, facilitating hands-on learning and basic radio astronomy observations for college students.

Findings

Detection of the Sun's brightness temperature at 11.2 GHz

Observation of celestial sources like Saturn and the Milky Way

Development of a free, Python-based data analysis pipeline

Abstract

We have developed an affordable, portable college level radio telescope for amateur radio astronomy which can be used to provide hands-on experience with the fundamentals of a radio telescope and an insight into the realm of radio astronomy. With our set-up one can measure brightness temperature and flux of the Sun at 11.2 GHz and calculate the beam width of the antenna. The set-up uses commercially available satellite television receiving system and parabolic dish antenna. We report the detection of point sources like Saturn and extended sources like the galactic arm of the Milky way. We have also developed python pipeline, which are available for free download, for data acquisition and visualization.