Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add Radio Astronomy plugin #1011

Merged
merged 9 commits into from
Oct 12, 2021
Merged

Add Radio Astronomy plugin #1011

merged 9 commits into from
Oct 12, 2021

Conversation

srcejon
Copy link
Collaborator

@srcejon srcejon commented Oct 12, 2021

This patch adds a Radio Astronomy plugin. It supports:

  • A spectrometer for displaying time averaged spectra.
  • A radiometer for displaying time averaged continuum measurements (total power).
  • Calibration to enable measurements to be displayed as noise temperatures (K), power (dBm/Watts) and spectral flux density (Jy).
  • Utilities are included for estimation and calculation of noise temperature components (Tsys, Trx, Tgal, Tatm, Tsky, Tsp) and sensitivity (sigma Tsys and sigma Sv).
  • Spectra can be displayed against frequency and velocity (with a configurable reference spectral line), with the velocity adjusted to topocentric, Solar System barycentric or the Local Standard of Rest (LSR) reference frames.
  • Calculation and plotting of radial and Galactocentric distance to HI clouds, based on spectral peaks.
  • Position of HI clouds can be sent to Star Tracker plugin for visualisation on the Galactic line-of-sight image and created in to an animation mapping out the Milky Way's spiral arms.
  • A Gaussian fitting tool in the spectrometer for HI cloud kinetic temperature and column density estimation.
  • A Gaussian fitting tool in the radiometer to enable antenna HPBW measurement from Solar drift-scans.
  • Ability to record and plot real-time surface air temperature and other sensor measurements (component voltages / temperatures) alongside radiometer measurements.
  • Ability to export charts to animated .png files and static image files.
  • Reference spectra from the LAB (Leiden/Argentine/Bonn) Galactic HI survey can be automatically downloaded and plotted for comparison against user measurements.
  • 2D sweeps can be made and plotted in different coordinate systems (Az/El, Galactic, offsets around a target and drift scans).
  • All spectra are held in memory and can be scrolled through.
  • Data can be saved and loaded from .csv files.
  • Hardware for calibration (E.g. RF switches) can be automatically controlled.

It also includes some updates to the Star Tracker feature:

  • Plot Sun and Moon on sky temperature chart.
  • Plot markers on Galactic line-of-sight chart.
  • Create animations from Galactic line-of-sight chart.
  • Allow weather at antenna location to be downloaded from openweathermap.org
  • Allow target to be entered as Galactic longitude / latitude.
  • Add azimuth and elevation offsets to support scans around targets.
  • Add S7, S8 and S9 targets.
  • Refactor some code from GUI to main plugin, so computed values can be used in other plugins.

As well as a fix for #1010 in the GS-232 Controller.

In 05fce63 I've added support for messages pipes from Features to Channels. You may want to review this to see if it can be done more nicely / tidied up. One particular issue is the Feature inherits from QObject, but ChannelAPI doesn't, so the passing of messages is a little different between the two.

Plot Sun and Moon on sky temperature chart.
Plot markers on Galactic line-of-sight chart.
Create animations from Galactic line-of-sight chart.
Allow weather at antenna location to be downloaded from openweathermap.org
Allow target to be entered as Galactic longitude / latitude.
Add azimuth and elevation offsets to support scans around targets.
Add S7, S8 and S9 targets.
Refactor some code from GUI to main plugin, so computed values can be used in other plugins.
@f4exb f4exb merged commit 01e2ea9 into f4exb:master Oct 12, 2021
@srcejon srcejon deleted the radio_astronomy branch October 26, 2021 20:38
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants