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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