Community Builds

Here are some stories from people who have built their own CHART. If you want us to highlight your build, tell us about it by signing up for our Google Group and sending a summary, or email the project mentors directly.

The map below shows locations of CHART builds. In principle, combining many small telescopes spread out like this can result in a very powerful telescope with extremely high resolution. The technique is called long-baseline interferometry, and it’s how radio astronomers were able to produce images of black holes. The plot on the right is just for fun, showing all the telescope pairs for such a hypothetical interferometer. Of course, this is far beyond the capabilities of CHART, and there are no (current) plans to do this.

Petrified Forest National Park

Arizona, 2022

ASU students Amy Zhao and Libby Berkhout brought their scope along for a trip to the Petrified Forest to try it in a very low RFI environment (compared to the Phoenix area). When they returned home and looked at their data, they found the noise was much higher than expected, and they suspect this was due to plugging in the amplifier after the long coax cable. The LNA needs to be as close to the probe as possible to amplify the tiny astronomical signal before it diminishes on the way to the other electronics. While their data didn’t turn out great, they learned about the importance of rehearsing the setup before taking the horn out into the wild. Subsequently we developed a printable packing list and field procedure guide to help make observing run smoothly. Amy and Libby’s cool pictures were an awesome side benefit! You can read about their adventure in their memo.