[fedora-astronomy] Introductions

Wed Jan 2 09:45:08 UTC 2008

Hello Lamar,

Lamar Owen wrote:
> Good morning, and an early Happy New Year to everyone.
> 
> I first learned of this SIG Saturday; very cool.  I have downloaded and have 
> read the archives of the mailing list (nothing like getting a little history, 
> even if that isn't but a month long) and I plan on attending the meeting on 
> the 11th, unless something work related comes up.
>
> By way of introductions, I am CIO at the Pisgah Astronomical Research 
> Institute (PARI), which is one of the few observatories with both optical and 
> radio capabilities.  

Wow, happy to see you here! :)

> We currently have several optical instruments, from a pair of solar telescopes 
> with Ethernet video webcams to a 16 inch DFM with an Apogee Ethernet CCD, and 
> we have four dish-type radio instruments: two 26 meter X-Y mounted prime 
> focus parabolics good  up to 12-14GHz; a 12.2 meter prime focus parabolic 
> good to 26-30GHz; and a 4.6 meter prime focus parabolic good up to the low 
> millimeter range.  We also have a few HF arrays for use with the Radio Jove 
> program, observing the sun and Jupiter in the 20-28 MHz band.  We also host 
> another radio instrument from Virginia Tech; see 
> http://www.ece.vt.edu/swe/eta/ for lots and lots of details on this exciting 
> instrument.
> 
> The 12.2 meter is in need of major work, and is mothballed pending funding.
> 
> The two 26 meter telescopes are in the midst of drive and feed upgrades; DFM 
> Engineering is performing the drive upgrades (this is the second drive 
> upgrade on these telescopes that they've done for us; this gets us 27 bit 
> absolute encoders and Ethernet connectivity for control and telemetry); the 
> feeds are being upgraded to thermally stabilized dual, coaxial 2.4GHz and 
> 8.5GHz for extreme scattering event research as an interferometer, funded 
> through an NSF MRI grant.  Also, PARI is collaborating with Furman University 
> Astronomer Dr. David Moffett on pulsar monitoring research in the 318MHz 
> band; the instrument is currently off-line, but the pulsar radiometer backend 
> is on Linux (currently an older Fedora).
> 
> The 4.6 meter Andrew parabolic is in active use for our School of Galactic 
> Radio Astronomy educational program, and has a 1.42GHz hydrogen RF chain and 
> spectrometer.  This telescope is currently internet controllable through a 
> Java applet in-browser (the applet doesn't work with the F8 java stack, 
> unfortunately), and with a custom java servlet backend.  The SGRA program 
> teaches middle school teachers how run the telescope remotely, how to perform 
> doppler spectroscopy to determine the galactic rotational characteristics, 
> and how to teach their classes how to do this.  The telescope has a smiley 
> face painted on it (long story), so it is nicknamed 'Smiley' for obvious 
> reasons.  

Is the java applet available somewhere? I'm wondering why it's not
working with IcedTea java.

> Smiley also gets used for solar astronomy at 1.4GHz (we have a program, called 
> Space Science Lab, that teaches high school sophomores and juniors, in a one 
> week on-site seminar setting, all about solar astronomy, from optical all the 
> way down to 20MHz radio, and Smiley is a part of that.  In the SSL program, 
> the students spend one week on site, learning astronomy, radio astronomy, 
> basic electronics, soldering, troubleshooting, etc: they build a Radio Jove 
> kit radiometer, and if they don't have their own PC, we give them one with 
> the require software preloaded; out of 57 kits attempted at this point, 56 
> have been successfully constructed within the one week seminar; the 57th kit 
> had a bad PC board).
> 
> We have a number of other programs; you can see the breadth of them on our 
> website at www.pari.edu

That's a nice gear. I hope to have chance visit your institute if I'm
around someday. :)

> Personally, I have run Red Hat and Fedora Linux since Red Hat Linux 4.1 in 
> 1997.  I was the PostgreSQL Global Development Group's RPM maintainer from 
> 1999 through 2004 (my base spec file is still in RHEL4), when I passed the 
> maintainership to Devrim Gunduz, as personal reasons prevented me from doing 
> the builds in a timely fashion at that time.  Since then, of course, 
> automated buildsystems have come of age, and packaging is a much simpler 
> process than it was then.

:)

> On the subject of packages, I see in the rejected packages list IRAF.  Getting 
> permission from UCAR to distribute NCAR as a part of Fedora would be killer, 
> as IRAF is de rigeur for optical astronomy.  For radio astronomy, getting the 
> former AIPS and AIPS++ packages, as well as the currently maintained CASA 
> packages, in Fedora would be killer, as that is pretty much required for 
> single dish and interferometer imagery in radio astronomy.

Regarding Iraf, x11iraf is under review,
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=249614
Since one month I'm trying to contact Mr. Romanovski, which after years
of studies in US, is back in Russia.

> Also, GNUradio has an astronomy section; with a Universal Software Radio 
> Peripheral (USRP) with a DBRX daughterboard, and a medium-sized dish (2-4 
> meters) useful 1.4GHz radio astronomy can be done.  GNUradio requires wx, and 
> the radio astronomy examples require PyEphem; getting PyEphem in Fedora would 
> be great in general for astronomy, as PyEphem does all the interesting 
> calculations, including the absolutely required (for radio astronomy) local 
> standard of rest.  Having GNUradio packages (it's in Debian already) would be 
> great (I might be able to do these if no one else does them).

PyEphem and GNU Radio are on our wish list as well and I hope I'll
package it.

If someone is interesting in packaging GNU/Radio, Trond's spec file is
available at http://trondd.fedorapeople.org/spec_files/.

> In any case, it's great to see this SIG form, and I look forward to being able 
> to help in some fashion.  I see several names I recognize here; Jef, spot, in 
> particular.  We use Aurora Linux on a couple of our backends, running on an 
> E6500 and E5500 Sun Enterprise pair.

Please, don't hesitate to come to our next meeting, so we can discuss
what Fedora do for pari.edu.

-- 
Marek Mahut               https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Astronomy/
Fedora Project                                   http://www.jamendo.com/

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