We’ve been waiting patiently for Cassiopeia A to move far enough away from the Sun (back towards nighttime) to make observations feasible. In the last few days, we’ve been able to capture very high-quality transits, as shown below.

John Blais, of Almonte, Ontario, very kindly donated a 12ft Andrew solid-aluminum dish to us. The long-term plan is to incorporate it into our pulsar work.

Here it is in the truck, ready to go off to the lab:

We’ll make up a very-simple fixed-pointing mount, which will have the dish pointed nearly-vertical, with a 9 degree tilt to the North.

We changed the declination of the interferometer antennae to point at +41, and got several good transits of Cygnus A (3C405), shown below.

Our next target is Hercules A (3C348), at a declination of +5, currently transiting in the middle of the night for us, so no Sun problems.

Using CCERA’s “insanely small array” radio telescope, we have successfully completed a 4-day “study” of the extragalactic radio source Virgo A. Show below are both the complex-correlator outputs, and the brightness derivation. Virgo A, also known as M87, is a massive galaxy some 54 million light-years from earth. It plays host to a super-massive black hole at the center, which produces a super-luminal (apparently-faster-than-light) gas “jet” of ejected material.

Its radio flux at 611MHz (our observing frequency) is approximately 500 Jansky, or 5×10^-24 Watts/M^2/Hz of bandwidth. Since our antenna are roughly 1 M^2 in area, That means that we’re intercepting a few pico-watts of power from this source!

Our lab/office has successful moved downstairs, to Suite 104. We’re still working on bringing back some data services, like the 21cm spectrometer feed.

IN the last week, we’ve had success in making our UHF “pathfinder” interferometer operational, at a frequency of 611MHz, with a baseline of 33.5m. A “first light” interferogram from Virgo A is shown below. Virgo A, also known as M87, is a super massive elliptical galaxy roughly 54M light-years from earth. It is very luminous, making it easy to “see” with CCERA’s modest instrumentation.

We’re nearing completion of the move of our office/lab space one floor down, from suite 204 to suite 104. This was necessitated by some “reconfiguration” required by our landlord.

One side effect of this move is that we’ll not be providing the 21cm data products for a few days as we rebuild our IT environment.

The move *may* also have the desirable side-effect of reducing self-interference from our computers, since we’ll be both further away from the antenna, and also have another layer of *thick* concrete and terra-cotta block floor between our lab and the antennae on the roof.

We’ve re-jigged the pulsar array again, changing it from a 3 x 3 array to a 2 x 4 array. This geometry is much easier to manage, and it has allowed us to build a better reflector screen under the array, hopefully reducing the amount of ground radiation “seen” by the array elements.

We’ve been working to improve the functionality of the pulsar array in order to enhance the reliability and verifiability of ongoing observations of PSRB0329+54.

Gary Atkins and Marcus Leech re-engineered the pulsar array support structure, and have been working on adding a “fence” around the array, to exclude low-angle RFI, which is where most terrestrial interference will be coming from. More work needs to be done to extend the fence around the entire array, but the array is now better-balanced on the support structure.

In addition the front-end electronics have been replaced to improve up-front filtering, using a custom UHF filter provided by Jan Jency in Slovakia. Further versions of this filter will allow us to observe on any of the 3 radio astronomy frequencies in the North American UHF band, while suppressing others.

A peak inside the new front end shows a noise injector, and a new 1/4-wave filter/protector

The noise injector hasn’t been connected yet, but will allow us to do a quick “sanity test” of the entire pulsar system from the comfort of the lab.

Stay tuned 🙂 🙂

We’ve been working on improving EMI/RFI suppression of our own equipment, to improve the chances of confirming reception of pulsars, and radio astronomy in general.

We’ve added ferrite chokes to all computer cables, etc, and EVERY cable that goes across our bulkhead to the outside world has at least one ferrite choke on it.

We’re working on shielding our window, to reduce the area of radiation leakage from our own equipment to a minimum:

The existing bulkhead has had foil tape added to it, and one of the windows is completely covered with 6mm hardware cloth. The other windows will get a similar treatment.

The walls and ceiling are already fairly good from an RF leakage perspective–50cm concrete on the walls and roof deck, with both mesh and re-bar reinforcement. Given a randomly-chosen building, one couldnt’ ask for much better for doing sensitive radio receiving experiments. The office ceiling (which is dropped only about 20cm below the roof concrete deck) is made from interlocking steel tiles, locked into a steel rail system. Also an excellent serendipity for us.