Hello, my name is Ilaria Bellafiore, and I am a classical astronomer with a focus on optics.

The Universe is so beautiful and complex... how can one not see the face of God within the cosmos?

I pray that you find love and peace throughout space-time.

On utilizing a small radio telescope (1-3m)...

Spectral analysis is performed on the digitized signal, in software, using data type fftwf - complex in the FFTW library. The transformation is done in vspectra pci fftw.c. As exploring this provides an excellent opportunity to introduce students to Fourier techniques, some details of the process are given here. The DAS-4020 PCI bus ADC card buffer size is set as static unsigned short buffer1[0x200000]; ie, 2 x 165 = 2097152 short integers (2 bytes = 16 bits each), somewhat bigger than needed, as each transfer sends nsam = 0x100000; =1048576 12-bit samples to memory (each 12-bit sample in a 16-bit integer). A single "integration period" (update period of the screen) is chosen to consist of 20 transfers of 1048576 samples; each sample is 50 nanoseconds long (a 20 MHz sample rate is used to obtain a 10 MHz bandwidth -since these are real samples the Nyquist rate is twice the bandwidth): this is about 1 second of data.

My favorite method of photometry is through the use of circular apertures! Below, I present the location, calibration, and aperture photometry of a gamma ray burst using data collected from the end of the GRB's observation, hence why the SNR is not as desirable.

My favorite method of photometry is through the use of circular apertures! Below, I present the location, calibration, and aperture photometry of a gamma ray burst using data collected from the end of the GRB's observation, hence why the SNR is not as desirable.