Dear Life Members
You are invited to York College Engineering & Computer Science Campus for a presentation and demonstration of their Radio Telescope Project.
Your host is Dr. Kala Meah, Associate Professor and Susquehanna Section Vice Chair
Location is York College Campus, Kinsley Engineering Center
11am to 11:45am Presentation
11:45am to 12:15pm Demonstration
12:15pm to 1:00pm Complimentary Lunch
Please note: Registration is required. This tour is limited to the first 16 members to register. Registration will close with 16 registered.
Take Exit 15 from I-83
Drive until you see Country Club Rd and take a Left on Country Club Rd
Drive about 0.5 miles then take a Right on Grantley Rd
Drive about 0.3 miles and take a Right on Jackson St
Drive about 0.25 miles and take a left on N. Campus Drive (Second Stop Sign). This will lead you to the parking lot.
A Brief Introduction to the Radio Telescope Project
The York College of Pennsylvania (YCP) engineering and Computer Science programs collaborated with the York County Astronomical Society (YCAS) and York County Parks to design and fabricate a 4.5 m auto-tracking, auto-locating, publicly accessible radio telescope. After five years of research, design, and testing, the telescope is ready to install and operate at John C. Rudy County Park, York, PA. The YCAS radio telescope project is a multidisciplinary engineering capstone project involving mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science students. The telescope can automatically locate and track various celestial objects and collect 1.42 GHz radio frequency data emitting from these objects. This specific frequency is known as the hydrogen line and is a common frequency for radio telescopes to search for due to the abundance of hydrogen in the universe. While many components make up this project, this paper highlights the software service components developed for the telescope.
This telescope is a medium size solid dish radio telescope, similar to the Green Bank Telescope but at a smaller scale and different frequency range. All software components were built in house, but unlike many radio telescope software systems, the YCAS radio telescope software consists mostly of control and user interaction software, leaving the means of processing the raw data to the user of the telescope. The control software can perform multiple observation types including point, celestial body, raster, drift, moon, and sun observations, akin to the control software of the UTR-2 radio telescope but implements them differently due to the radio telescope type.
[]Similar to the Open Source Radio Telescopes (OSRT) project, the YCAS radio telescope project looks to educate communities about and facilitate amateur radio astronomy; however, this project differs in its approach. OSRT offers low-cost project telescope resources, but this project aims to provide public access to a radio telescope and education to the local community about radio astronomy. In tandem with YCP, this project also serves as an opportunity to explore the capabilities of undergraduate students tackling and leading a sufficiently complex, multi-year, multi-disciplinary project, similar to what most will experience in their careers.
Co-sponsored by: York College Engineering & Computer Science Dept.
Bldg: Kinsley Engineering Center, York College, 441 Country Club Rd., York, Pennsylvania, United States, 17403
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