Maybe, the time when being an astronomer and being tied to the observatory is gone?
Students of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) at the College of Engineering in Trivandrum created a portable radio telescope, suitable for schools and colleges. The telescope is quite simple for professional, but it fits good to amateurs and students. Special data analysis tool also has been created and made affordable to educational institutions. The technology is low cost and mad with a priority of accessibility of sources for device construction. The small radio telescope can measure the brightness temperature of the sun, detect point sources and extend sources like the galactic arm of Milky Way. However, while big radio telescopes are necessary for detecting radio waves from astronomical sources, a new small telescope is also showing not bad results.
Students telescope had only 3.23 percent maximum error, what was turn out while measuring the brightness temperature of the sun. The open source planetarium software, with which scientists are working, is called Stellarium.
Block diagram of the radio telescope setup. Credit: Pranshu Mandal et al., 2016.
Astronomers also embedded telescope construction with Arduino Uno, that helps to digitalize the intensity from satellite finder at 10Hz sampling rate.
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