Author: Bill Thomas

DSES at Recent Events

Bill WT0DX represented DSES at three recent ham radio events: The CSVHF Conference, the Rocky Mountain Division Convention and the Denver Radio Club Hamfest. In each case, a posterboard display was set up, site videos were displayed, and club brochures were handed out. The upcoming Open House was also promoted.

CSVHF Conference

The annual CSVHF conference was held July 27-30 in Little Rock, AR. There were about 150 participants. The posterboard display was set up in the main meeting room and the Friday night swap room. In addition to talking about the club, several folks said they were interested in attending the Open House.

Rocky Mountain Division Convention

The Rocky Mountain Division Convention was held August 11-13 in Albuquerque, NM. They provided a free table for clubs in the swap meet area. There were about 400 attendees, and many interesting conversations. Unfortunately, many of the folks thought that the DSES site was too far away for an Open House visit.


Bill also had an opportunity to discuss DSES with David Minster NA2AA the CEO of ARRL. He was unaware of the club but found it very interesting.

Denver Radio Club Hamfest

The Denver Radio Club Hamfest was held on Sunday August 27th at the Adams County Fairgrounds. This is a well-attended hamfest and we had many good conversations about the club, with quite a bit of interest in the Open House. Also, Paul NO0T managed to secure a great donation to the club of several HF Yagi antennas.

New DSES Building Update

An update on the progress of our DSES building project. Our DSES Vice President and Project Manager, Bill Miller, has spent many hours and has made many trips down to the Plishner Site near Haswell Colorado to make this project happen.  After many delays, some due to COVID, in finding contractors for concrete, plumbing, and electrical as well as building manufacturers to provide a 60-foot by 30-foot structure, DSES has finally made some progress.  We still have many hours of interior/exterior work and antenna towers to place before we can move our current operations from the existing communications trailer and the underground bunker.  This future work will still require many trips and hours on site to complete these tasks.  We hope our local Colorado DSES members will be able to provide some help in completing these projects.  DSES will provide dates and times of these trips so members can plan their time at the Plishner Site.  A big thank you to Bill Miller for taking on this project and to those other members who were able to assist him over the past few months. 

Myron Babcock

President/Treasurer

DSES

Colorado Springs Cool Science Festival

Cool Science Festival Presentation on Saturday October 11, 2020

Rich Russel made an online presentation at the Cool Science Festival. The presentation covered the science of radio astronomy and the accomplishments of the Deep Space Exploration Society. The presentation was streamed live on Facebook and Youtube. You can watch the presentation here:

Carnival Day 2020: DSES – Finding Pulsars Using Radio Astronomy (3:50 pm)

Astronomer Rich Russel from the Deep Space Exploration Society describes how he uses the 60-foot Plishner radio astronomy dish antenna 90 miles southwest of Colorado Springs to detect pulsars in deep space.This live-stream presentation was part of our virtual Cool Science Carnival Day for kids, the main event of the 2020 Colorado Springs Cool Science Festival. You can find more information at:https://www.coolscience.org/carnivalday.html

Posted by Colorado Springs Cool Science Festival on Saturday, October 10, 2020

This 8-day regional event, designed to ignite wonder and inspire curiosity about the world around us, attracts between 10,000 and 20,000 attendees each year. For more information about the Cool Science Festival go to:

http://www.coolscience.org

DSES Sept 19, 2020 Pulsar Observing Trip Observes 2 More Pulsars

Bob Haggart and Rich Russel did an observation all nighter on Friday/Saturday (September 19, 2020, GMT) and observed 2 pulsars.
VELA (B0833-45) is one of the strongest pulsars at 5 JY while B1946+35 is at 0.145 JY.
DSES is one of the most northern amateur stations to detect VELA. We detected it in 15 minutes at 5 to 6 degrees elevation.
This make 13 pulsars and puts us 5th on the international amateur pulsar hunter list. http://www.neutronstar.joataman.net/

DSES Pulsar Observing Team netted 5 new pulsars!

The DSES team of Rich Russel, Ray Uberecken, and Glenn Davis observed for pulsars on Saturday September 5, 2020 at the DSES 60-foot dish antenna at Haswell, CO.

The team successfully observed 5 pulsars which we hadn’t been able to detect before.

The success is attributed to the calibration of the antenna pointing system and the new automatic tracking system developed by the System 1 team.

We started with calibrating the azimuth of the antenna (it was 2.5 degrees off!) Elevation was good. Glenn put the offset in the auto tracking system and we were able to detect the B0329+54 pulsar within 30 minutes. (We use the B0329+54 pulsar, the first one we successfully saw last May, as a starting reference. If we can observe this, we know our system is working.) Every pulsar we looked at after that was detected – we just ran out of time for more!

It is possible we missed observing previous pulsars because our pointing accuracy was off.

See the slide set for our observation summary.

http://dses.science/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/8-Pulsars-Observed-so-Far-9-5-20-r3.pdf

We are pretty sure we observed the Crab pulsar. The last slide shows an analysis of the time between pulses we measured for the Crab pulsar, compared to the standard reference database.

More detail to come at the next science meeting

Our total pulsar count is now 8!

Deep Space Exploration Society 3rd pulsar observed on Saturday July 11, 2020

By Dr. Richard Russel, DSES Science Lead

The pulsar, B1133+16, was observed on the 60 ft dish antenna by Rich Russel and Ray Uberecken after 4 hours of tracking and collecting data on the pulsar.

This pulsar is the weakest object observed by DSES at 0.257 Janskys!

The pulsar is noted for having a “conal double” peak in its profile. Our observation picks this out very well.

The PRESTO analysis program results are shown below.

The conal double plot is produced from the raw data and plotted in excel.

PSR B1133+16 is located at RA 11h 33m 27s Declination +16.07°, in the northeast part of the constellation Leo. It was observed with a pulse period of 1.187 seconds. Our center frequency was 417 MHz, and we used a 10 MHz bandwidth.

(The name B1133+16 conveys the celestial sky coordinates, referenced to a standard year epoch. In this case the B indicates the position is from the year 1950, the “Besselian” year, named after the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel.)

Congratulations to the entire membership for turning the DSES dish into a world class scientific instrument!

Thanks!

Dr. Richard Russel

DSES Science Lead

First DSES Pulsar captured on the 60-ft dish by the observing team of Richard A. Russel, Ray Uberecken, Bob Haggart On May 2, 2020

By Dr. Richard Russel, DSES Science Lead.

The pulsar, B0329+54 (J0332+5434)1, was observed on the third try just before the team was ready to pack up for the day on Saturday, May 2, 2020. A final modification of the software defined radio settings was tried (all the gains were set to a minimum) did the trick.

The 60-ft dish was setup to manually track the pulsar using the System 1 tracking program software developed by Glenn Davis and Phil Gage. This program allowed us to track the pulsar’s position by keeping it in the bullseye.

We observed at a frequency of 420 MHz, with a bandwidth of 10 MHz.

The pulsar system was initiated last year by Steve Plock. Our mentor throughout the effort has been Dr. Joe Martin (K5SO) in New Mexico. Joe validated that we made a successful pulsar capture.

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The GNU radio software was turned on to start the acquisition.

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It should be noted that you cannot tell if you have the pulsar real-time because it is pulsing way below the noise level. After about 30 minutes, we stopped the acquisition and we moved the post-processing over to Bob’s new workbench.

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Bob Haggart constructing the new workbench.
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The new workbench in the science trailer, built by Bob Haggart.

Rich and Ray celebrate our first pulsar! (Bob’s taking the picture)

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The first iteration of post -processing requires that the pulsar period be estimated with a program called TEMPO. The first iteration is shown below. It clearly shows a pulsar because of the prominent peaks and the lines tracing down the plots, however it is not quite set to the optimum period.

After some more iterations the final picture looked cleaner.

More analysis using the resultant data files allowed us to verify the pulsar as B0329+54 (J0332+5434).

Even the pulse width at the 50% height (W50) was estimated. The preliminary analysis below shows a measured W50 of 6 ms. The current value in the ATNF database is 6.6 ms. This is real close and confirms our observation.

More observation runs are planned and DSES can can consider itself one of the few amateur organizations to accomplish pulsar observations2.

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Reference:

  1. PSR B0329+54 is a pulsar approximately 3,460 light-years away in the constellation of Camelopardalis. It completes one rotation every 0.71452 seconds and is approximately 5 million years old.[Ref: wikipedia]
  2. Our successful observation is reported in Neutron Star Group http://neutronstar.joataman.net/

Very Large Array (VLA) Image Reduction Results

Recently Dr. Richard Russel attended the Very Large Array (VLA) Imaging course in Socorro, New Mexico. This course taught how to take the data sets from the VLA archive and produce images. The following is the first set of images reduced from the VLA archive by Dr. Russel.

Images were made of these astronomical objects:

  • 3C75 Binary Black Hole System
  • 3C391 Supernova Remnant
  • Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) Star IRC+10216
  • MG0414+0534 Gravitational Lens HI Absorption Line

Each image takes about 1 day to produce from the raw observation.

http://dses.science/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/VLA-Imaging-Results-1.pdf

Hydrogen Drift Scan using the new 9-foot Dish

By Dr. Richard Russel

The DSES 9-foot dish is operational at Dr. Russel’s house in Colorado Springs. It is outfitted with a 1420 MHz feed with 2 low-noise amplifiers with over 40 dBi of gain and a noise figure of 0.35. The receiving system is a Spectracyber 1.

The output of the Spectracyber shows the relative peaks of hydrogen with a corresponding Doppler measurement.

Dr. Russel performed a drift scan of the visible sky and plotted the relative peak hydrogen signals.

The hydrogen maps very well to the visible Milky Way. The plot below converts the Celestial Coordinates into Galactic Coordinates. Note that the peak hydrogen is concentrated near the 0 Galactic Latitude.

Special Thanks to Ray Uberecken and Steve Plock for helping to set up the system.

For more information:

Dr. Richard Russel: DrRichRussel(at)netscape.net

Deep Space Exploration Society: www.DSES.science

Plishner Antenna Site Work Trip Reports for July 10 & 20, 2019

By Ed Corn

Trip Report for July 10

My wife and I spent the day at the site cleaning up the last of the electric basic infrastructure build out. That portion is complete with the following items completed.

  • Basic plug ins complete including a GFI plug near the sink and one in the bathroom for portable heater.
  • A pre wire and extra switch in bathroom for future ex-host fan and an electric water heater for shower and kitchen sink.
  • Box and wiring for sewer pump when that project starts.
  • Wall switch and permanent light in sleeping area.
  • The tunnel lights now have a control switch at both ends.
  • 240 volt plugins for amplifiers at the Amateur operating position.
  • The sub main electric panel in the battery room is complete and the main panel has the trim cover installed.

There will be extra plugs and services  that will be needed in the future but basic build out is complete.

* *

Scheduled Maintenance Trip Report for July 20

Steve and I went down Friday the 19th. We met Paul Berge at the house in Haswell. Paul and his wife came down Thursday and stayed over Thursday and Friday nights. Steve and I stayed in the bunker Friday night.

Paul worked on finishing installing the control wiring in the pedestal in the conduit for mechanical protection, and he installed heavy duty override switches in the override panel in the comm trailer. He also gathered information for some updates on the control wiring. He will be working on the updates at his home computer.

Steve worked on the fiber link from the feed point to the comm trailer. The wind came up Saturday so Steve will complete work later as the wind was a safety issue trying to work up at the feed point. Steve did say the az/el readout worked after cycling power.

I have the two 30 amp plug-in circuits at the old generator building completed to give us 2 more RV parking spots with heavy enough power to run 1 air conditioner in each RV. Just for information to turn lights on in the generator building you will have to turn the circuit breakers on in the distribution panel in the middle  of the North wall.