From: William Edmondson (W.H.Edmondson_at_cs.bham.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Dec 29 2005 - 13:03:00 PST
Hi folks
You may recall many months back I posted a URL for a paper I'd had
published on a new search strategy. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~whe/
SETIPaper.pdf
In February his year I visited Arecibo to gather some data, having
being awarded some time (see http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~whe/
AOproposal.pdf). We eventually had ~30 hours of dedicated 'scope
time. Pretty impressive. I even got to drive the machine from my
office back in UK for one observation session!
It's been a bit of a slog to get the data storage and processing
hardware organized (I don't work in a physics/astronomy department at
the Uni in Birmingham - and yes, although I DO work in a Computer
Science department we are the last people to need lots of storage
etc....; it's a pretty theoretical department and many of my
colleagues work with pencil and paper!).
Shortly before Christmas the last two disks arrived from Arecibo and
I now have 3TB of data connected to a dual G5 Mac dedicated to SETI
work.
So now the hard work begins. I am, essentially, using some well-known
techniques from the world of pulsar search astronomy. I can
recommend the following (but it is expensive):
Handbook of Pulsar Astronomy, by Duncan Lorimer and Michael Kramer.
Cambridge University Press. 2005.
Duncan has been helpful with advice (my physics is a little rusty,
having completed my degree several decades ago and then moving on to
other fields).
I am focussing at the moment on folding techniques, with some
dispersion correction as well (although the target stars are not that
far away one might envisage a small mark to space ratio in a pulsed
transmission, which implies the need for de-dispersion to preserve
pulse shape....). I am doing this because we have a target
periodicity to search for, and folding can significantly enhance S/N
ratio. I'll probably try some FFT as well, just in case there is a
pulsar waiting to be discovered!
I'll probably provide another update in a year's time.
Happy searching in 2006.
William Edmondson
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