This is my first devlog so its probably a good idea to give a recap on what I did before joining stardance. This project had his first thoughts way back in september 2025. During the summer of 2025 i decided to give a local astronomical event a try called AstroCamp, I ended up performing well and as give the invite to become part of the project other people from previous years were working, we had a common goal of remaking the Eddington experiment, an experiment which is based on detecting how much light trajectory was influenced by the Sun’s gravity, this effect is so weak that it only deflects light passing right next to the Sun surface by 1,75 arcseconds (an arcsecond is a 1/3600 of a degree) and it drops with the reciprocal of distance, so you have to detect light coming from as close to the Sun as possible, that’s easier said that done as the Sun is way brighter than the stars in the backround and as you probably know its very hard to see stars during the day, the solution? Put something in front of the sun and block him, now you may ask how do you block the Sun from reaching Earth? You use the Moon as your cover, so you have to wait for a total eclipse, being time restrained and not having much to do in the meantime every student was sugested to start their own personal project where they would share their progress every now and then and recieve help from the senniors. That’s how this project started, Earth’s atmosphere blocks many radiation frequencies from reaching the ground, having two big bandwidths of good frequencies for astronomy the visible and radio, hydrogen the most common element every now and then goes through a process called hyperfine transition which emits a photon at 1420MHz, this process is usefull because it happens even if the hydrogen is very cold, alowing us to detect hydrogen clouds invisible to visible light. During the months leading up to today I made my research, tried to get funding from my school and procastinated a lot, but with school ending and having much free time i got back to it and bought a used 182cm parabolic dish for 50 euros from a man that looked sketchy at best, today for my radio telescope I need an antenna, signal processing and signal analisis, the antenna is made up by a dish and a feedhorn, the signal processing is made by two devices: an amplifier wich is usualy does much more than amplifying and a software defined radio wich converts analog signals into digital signals so the data can be processed by a common computer. Today I chose what low noise amplifier (LNA) the “Nooelec SAWbird+ H1” and software denined radio dongle (SDR) the “Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5 SDR” as well as the harware needed to connect them, also played around with a CAD model.
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