DSES Technical and Operations Meeting Minutes- October 8, 2018

DSES Technical and Operations Meeting Minutes- October 8, 2018 by Bill Miller, DSES Vice President and Acting Secretary.

[Please click to read the PDF file.]

News & Announcement Board

Upcoming Activities

Dear DSES Members,
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and our desire to protect our members, our annual DSES Annual All Members Meeting that we had planned at this time, IS CANCELLED. We are looking at ways to hold a virtual meeting with everyone in the future so watch for that.

In the meantime, we have counted the 2020 DSES Board of Directors Election ballots. There were 19 ballots cast to our web email. Of those ballots all unanimously voted for all four available nominees with no write-ins or other votes.

So, the newly elected or retained BOD members are:

Gary Agranat
Myron Babcock
Bob Sayers
Bob Haggart

Please watch for future DSES Emails on officer assignments, annual report and virtual meetings.

Best Regards and Stay Well,
Bill Miller
DSES President

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The Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers cancelled its 2020 Western Conference. The Society intends to schedule the 2021 Western Conference at the same location, in Socorro, New Mexico..

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Work trips to the Haswell antenna site are now scheduled for each third Saturday of the month, with weather alternates on Sunday. This third weekend was chosen because it comes between our engineering and science meetings. Having a regular date helps our members plan ahead, especially those who must travel long distances.

Our engineering meetings are held on the second Monday of each month. Members can participate remotely using Teamviewer. Our science meetings are held on the fourth Monday of each month. Start time is 5:30 PM. Please contact us if you would like information to attend.

News

Skip Crilly K7ETI made this updated presentation about the latest results from our joint observations for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) at HamSCI 2020: Synchronized Multiple Radio Telescope Microwave SETI, March 2020.

A new article in the April 2020 Scientific American is A New Map of the Milky Way, by astronomers Mark J. Reid and Xin-Wu Zheng. It describes recent studies with radio astronomy VLBI to more accurately map the spiral structure of our galaxy using MASER features of young hot stars. The studies suggest slight changes to how we have defined our spiral arms. We provide some background information, and link to the full article.

[Updated March 19, 2020] DSES members Tony Bigbee, Bill Miller and Gary Agranat served as judges for the 2020 Pikes Peak Regional Science Fair on February 22. We have a special post written about our participation in it, with more details. Tony served as a general judge. Bill and Gary served as special judges representing DSES. DSES awarded 1st Place and Honorable Mention awards in both the Senior and Junior High School categories. This year DSES supported high school student Xander Duvall of the Thomas MacLaren School, for his project "Analysis of Neutral Hydrogen Radio Emissions in the Milky Way galactic plane".

Our February DSES Science Meeting was held on February 24, 2020. The slides and some background information are now posted. The meeting was led by DSES Science Lead Dr. Richard Russel. DSES February 2020 Science Meeting.

We posted a photo report of our Radio astronomy observing and antenna repair at the Plishner observatory, February 15, 2020.

The Technical Operations and Planning Meeting Minutes for February 10, 2020 are online. Written by Floyd Glick with contribution from Bill Miller.

Website Update Notes

Education Page

Link to Open Source Radio Telescopes (OSRT), a database and collaboration center for radio astronomy telescope construction at any level. - thanks to Skip Crilly.

Link to Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation. - thanks to Skip Crilly.

An educational article from Space.com that explains nebulas and stellar evolution was added to our Education Page. See "The Fabulous Lives of Nebulas" by Paul Sutter (Space.com, July 6, 2016), in the Topics Section of our . [Added March 21, 2020]

We started a section for Suggested Reading on the lower part of the page.

The DSES Publications Pages was revised and neatened.

Active Experiments

Current experiments now in progress at the Plishner Radio Astronomy & Space Science Center site in Haswell:

60-foot dish antenna:

Current main work with the 60-foot antenna is to develop our ability to detect pulsars. This includes being able to track (at this time manually tracking) on specific celestial coordinates.

We are regularly using the 60 foot dish antenna for joint observing runs for SETI with Skip Crilly at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. These joint observations are discussed in several of Skip's presentation slides. Please see our publications and presentations page.

Jupiter Radio Science Experiment "Radio Jove":
20.1 MHz monitoring of Jupiter and its moon Io, using a 2-element phased dipole antenna - currently down, pending repair of the receiver.

Experiments in Colorado Springs:

Drift scan survey of Milky Way of HI 1420 MHz spectral line.

Development of hardware/software and techniques for detecting pulsars.

Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance Monitor (SID):
- 25 kHz VLF Solar flare monitoring

More information about our currently running experiments