Chapter 2: Radio Astronomy Fundamentals

3 February
We started on Chapter 2.  Particular websites of interest are:
http://www.nrao.edu/whatisra/history.shtml   (History of radio astronomy)
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bbtest3.html (Discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation)
http://www.bigear.org/vol1no1/burnell.htm  (Little Green Men)
http://www-outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphy/pulsars/pulsars_index.htm (Discovery of Pulsars)
http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/psr1913.htm (Indirect detection of gravitational waves)

  6 -10 February
We learned about power, spectral power, brightness, brightness distribution, and flux density. Do you recall the units?
We considered an antenna looking at part of a source brightness distribution and figured out what we would measure.
An antenna is, in most cases, a one-pixel camera. We went in more detail through the differences and similarities between the convolution integral as a mathematical description of the output of a linear filter and the convolution integral as a mathematical description of what is measured by an antenna when scanning a source. Difference is that the source function is convolved with the mirror image of the beam pattern whereas
the mirror image is not taken of the impulse response.

20 -27 February
We looked at different combinations of source brightness distribution and
beam pattern. Today was also the second and last day where we had a double lecture to make up for the cancelled lectures.

We focussed on the blackbody characteristics, antenna temperature, spectral power and noise.

Assignment #2 was returned, and we discussed  the problem sets in detail. We continued with Chapter 2.

2 March
We finished Chapter 2 by considering how Penzias and Wilson  could be so sure that they detected a residual temperature of about 3K
that could not be accounted for in terms of a contribution from their horn antenna and receiver set-up. Click here for the latest satellite to
measure the 3K background radiation