BTW, didn't see it in the article, so here's [0] a link to SARA (Society of Radio Astronomers). A personal long-term project is to use basic RA gear - which includes TV antennae - to demonstrate detection of (strong and well-known) pulsars.

[0] https://www.radio-astronomy.org/

Without beautiful images, the appeal to amateurs is very weak. How complicated would be to use one of these for scanning so we can obtain an image of the sky?

I saw a post a while ago where someone made a map of their room by moving some sensor (measured either noise level or wifi signal) around with stepper motors.

Edit:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aqqEYz38ens

Thanks for that link. That is uber nerdy And very exciting! The results of his 3d wifi survey, leave one begging for more fun research with those tools.

I think you underestimate amateurs, but nonetheless I guess you could construct an image of radio emissions from the signals.

On the contrary, understanding what can be gleaned from radio waves makes amateur radio astronomy alluring. I've been obsessed since nearly 30 years.

amateur astronomers are really into this kind of things actually

AFAIK several variations of the DIY 21-cm hydrogen line radio telescope project have existed throughout the years; the earliest one that I know of is documented in this poster from 2014. [0] It's certainly a fun, straightforward way to get a taste for radio astronomy, and I appreciate that the step-by-step guide and resources like Jupyter notebooks provided here make this project even more accessible.

I will say that gathering data that is unmistakably not noise, as well as meaningfully analyzing it, is difficult for would-be amateur radio astronomers (in my brief experience as a high school student aspiring to be one). I'd really like to see a version of this project that doesn't stop at just detection / ostensibly mapping Milky Way spectra, but given its limitations, I'm not sure if it's possible.

[0] https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~npatel/hornAntennaAASposterPDF...

Reminds Penzias-Wilson trumpet that detected cosmic background radiation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240418003453/https://www.nytim...

This is so cool! I want to build one of these with my kids someday.

How do you explain a pulsar to a kid?

Natural lighthouse, right? It's got a bright side and a dark side and spins around.

It’s more like it has a laser pointer stuck through its magnetic pole. You could do a little demo with say a potato and a laser pointer.