From today (August 11th) up until Friday the yearly Perseids meteor shower will have its peak. This phenomenon is not only interesting for amateur astronomers, professional astronomers will be observing them as well.
STORIES
In Humans of ASTRON we share stories about the people at ASTRON. Who are the people behind the discoveries and innovations and also, who are the people that make sure that everything runs smoothly? In this second part of the series, we’ll be sharing the story of Jorrit Siebenga, who joined ASTRON in 2017 as research instrument maker.
Throughout the history of astronomy, women have played essential roles towards astronomical breakthroughs. In this article we highlight but a few of these women identified in history from 1600 to the modern era.
In Humans of ASTRON we share stories about the people at ASTRON. Who are the people behind the discoveries and innovations and also, who are the people that make sure that everything runs smoothly? In this second part of the series, we’ll be sharing the story of Emanuela Orrù, support scientist at ASTRON since 2012.
DAILY IMAGE
Ethernet Receiver detects the Milky Way
© ASTRON
The Ethernet receiver places the ADC close to the antenna, minimising analogue cable length and directly connecting the antenna to the Ethernet network.
The digitised data is transported over a fiber Ethernet link, with the clock sent towards the antenna using the White Rabbit protocol and the data stream returned from the antenna. The Ethernet receiver not only reduces copper costs but also enables flexible processing on GPUs.
The first plot shows frequency versus time. The structure visible across the band around 60 MHz is consistent with sky-dominated emission rather than local interference. The second plot shows the summed power between 58 and 59 MHz, which clearly increases as strong sources in the Milky Way move through the antenna beam. In red, the power of subband 300 (58.5 MHz) over the same time interval is shown for an LBA antenna at station CS002. This agreement confirms that the observed signal is dominated by astronomical sources rather than instrumental effects.
This confirms that the Ethernet receiver chain preserves weak sky signals and that the system noise is low enough to observe galactic emission.
For this demonstration, a small coaxial cable is used between the antenna and Huisje West; in the next step, the Ethernet receiver will be integrated into the antenna pole.
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