Rahul gives unsolicited advice

Well firstly, let me tell that you i've been trying to write atleast twice a week for the last 4 months. It was one of the few things in my life that i was trying to do on schedule. Granted, i wasn't always able to get 8 posts a month but i've been able to squeeze 6/7 out on an average. Now, coming to the point, i haven't been able to do the same for the last 2 weeks. For one, i was sick for most of the last 2 weeks. And on top of that, i've been going through a strange patch in my life and my mind is being constantly bombarded by thoughts, ideas and what not. I've thought, more than once in the last two weeks, of making a pill/machine that will help a person completely shut down their mind; no thoughts while you lay on your bed; no dreams; nothing. I haven't been productive at all; missing classes, falling behind on assignments, i kept wondering how it would be if i were a machine. Seriously, what if i were a machine instead of a human.  To start wit...

I thought i'd start something new this week. I shall start reading and understanding atleast 5 papers from this week on. While i was doing this in the 2010 summer as well, i couldn't understand most of the papers. I was just looking for interesting facts or snippets of awesomeness in the papers. Now that i've reached a position in my academic career where i can't keep brushing over the details, i thought this would be a good way to keep working on problems and understand new topics. So, the papers for this week are - Multi-Band Feeds: A Design Study  - is a paper on the antenna architectures. There are certain types of antennae known a Log-Periodic Antenna or Eleven Feed antenna which have a broad observing bandwidth. Though a broad observing bandwidth is a good thing, RF Interference will dwarf the astronomical signal in certain parts of the band! Inorder to avoid this, a new antenna architecture has been designed, simulated and implemented which has the capa...

This is second in a series of articles on the basics of astronomy and observational techniques. you can read the first article here . The articles will broadly cover the different kinds of telescopes used for the different energetic phenomenon associated with astronomy. In the previous article, the reader was hinted at the possibility of observations being carried out outside the visible spectrum using specific instruments. In this article, i will describe the different energy levels observed in astronomy and their associated phenomenon. I will mention the new telescopes which are observing emissions in these exotic bands and leave you to read further.  ElectroMagnetic Spectrum -  as we all know, the electromagnetic spectrum can be roughly divided up into -  Gamma Rays  X Rays  UV rays  Visible Light  IR rays  Microwave radiation  Radio waves this should help you better recollect the frequencies and wavelengths of the corresp...

So, i finally met the professor whom i've been stalking for almost 3 weeks now! I kept mailing the prof and swinging by his room, hoping that he'd be there. And last wednesday, i finally met him, Prof. HSR, a professor in the Elec Dept at IIT Madras. He's known to be a pundit on antenna design and simulations. When i started working on the radio astronomy project, as senior had asked me to contact him regarding any doubts and more fundamentally, the direction in which my project would head.  well, now that i've finally met him, i did get quite a few doubts cleared and know what i'm supposed to be doing in the coming months!  Apparently, as i suspected, the response function of the antenna or the gain from the antenna is frequency dependent and trying to deconvolute the signal (in the frequency spectrum) from the antenna without the proper response function is moot!  Also, in addition to the response function, the effective aperture of the antenna is also freq...

A couple of days back, we were really bored and we just got up and moved to the rooftop of the physics dept to try do some astro-photography. and here's what came of it - they are all pics of the same moon on the same night. the difference is the camera settings - The ISO and shutter speed. from what we realized, we suggest that you guys use ISO 100 at 1/30,1/60; ISO 200 at 1/60, 1/100; ISO 400 at 1/250, 1/600 and even 1/1000. The DSLR we used was a Canon 550D. ps - you need a telescope along with the usual camera to be able to take such pictures. 

A really important hurdle to clear in the process of radio astronomy is to decide on a frequency band to listen to and this is not a trivial process. because there is quite a bit of terrestrial communication(comm) signal and extra-terrestrial satellite comm. signals, we can't just build a antenna at any frequency and expect to be able to see extra-galactic radio signals.  This was one of the things i was having a hard time figuring out because there apparently are quite a few bands where we have less comm. noise but no explicit information on the spectrum allocation and the bands alloted specifically for radio astronomy.  I browsed through pages finding partial answers like this  one, which is relevant to australia and gives a brief outline of the bands where one can try observe using a radio telescope without having to worry about comm noise.  but that still wasnt satisfactory because i wanted to look at the indian scenario.  and then i struck gold. The...

So, it was just another weekend and i was abusing the 24 hour net connection we have on the weekend and surfing through the web, reading random articles from io9, engadget and arstechnica when i came upon this awesome collection. this is the list of all the movies that the authors took as case studies in writing the booj "Make It So : Design Lessons From SciFi".  2001: A Space Odyssey  Adaptive Path Charmr Aeon Flux Aesthedes AI - seen it Alien - seen it Alien Resurrection  Alien vs. Predator - seen it Apple Project 2000 Armageddon Avatar - obviously, seen it.  Back to the Future - watch all 3 every month!  Barbarella Batman - seen all of them and dream about being batman.  Battlestar Gallactica  Big Bang Theory - see every new episode and waiting for the new season  Blade Runner  Brainstorm Brazil Buck Rogers (1939) Children of Men Chronicles Of Riddick - seen it  Chrysalis Cisco Telepresence City of Lost ...

As i mentioned in the past , i was learning HTML and CSS3 to be able to write code for my own website and partially to see how hard it is to learn coding in HTML. And it's been an awesome experience!  I've put in hardly 15 Hrs into the whole thing and i now have a fairly good-looking webpage v1.2 , a fairly good looking update from v1.1 of the page which doesnt have the CSS3 styling hints to it. Though i havent mastered the language yet, i am getting good at it. who knows, maybe one day i might want to be a Web-Ops co-ordinator for my college's technical festival.  but right now, the only thing on my mind is to get a place on my department's or my college's server to host this webpage on it. as i've mentioned, linking a webpage about yourselves would be an easier way to contact profs than writing huge mails and resumes.  There's one other thing that i dont understand.  There are a lot of web operations coordinators who are free for the whole of the y...

As i mentioned, i am part of the amateur astronomy club at IIT Madras called Astro IITM and almost 6 weeks into the semester, we finally had our first freshers introduction session. this time around, as we are part of CFI (center for innovation), we were able to book CLT (central lecture theater). The session happened from 8-10:30 on the saturday, 15th September. Though we intended to have a theory session from 8-9 and move on to the roof top of the building to show them out telescopes and woo them, it started to rain 30 mins into the presentation and all our hopes for the rest of the night were swept away in the rain. but, we did continue the theory session till 10PM, continued further talking about observations, black holes and what not till 10:30, at which point, the guard asked us to wrap it up as it was getting too late :D... the session was based on the scale of the universe flash website, we introduced them to the different yard sticks when it comes to sizes, the small and e...

Well, as I written before here and here , I am currently working on radio astronomy. I had been putting off working on it for almost 2 years until last summer when things finally picked up some pace. Well, atleast in one sense. The first thing any amateur astronomer interested in pursuing radio astronomy and building a radio telescope should know about is The Radio Jove project. It is an amateur radio astronomy project backed by NASA based on a dipole antenna capable enough to observe radio emissions from jupiter and the sun. As for why this particular frequency was chosen instead of others, i have no answer. The sun is a black body and emits a continuum radio spectrum and jupiter has an emission peak at 20.1MHz. You can read up more about the emissions processes on wiki or google for the, that is not the topic for this blog post.  Now, looking at the material from the project  site , I estimate that the original team stopped updating the manuals after version 1.2,...