Daily Image
29-01-2010Parkes rocks!
| Submitter: | Marijke Haverkorn |
| Description: | STAPS, the Southern Twenty-centimeter All-sky Polarization Survey, is a radio polarization survey of the entire southern sky at 1300-1800 MHz done with the Parkes single-dish radio telescope in Parkes, NSW, Australia. ASTRON researcher Marijke Haverkorn and colleagues are scanning the sky pixel by pixel, steering the telescope back and forth along the horizon while the sky drifts by. All observations happen at night to avoid the polarized signal from the sun and disturbances from an active day-time ionosphere. Do this 70 full nights per year for a few years, and one will have acquired intimate knowledge of all that crawls, jumps, and flies around at night in the Australian outback, as well as a pretty neat data set. To celebrate that today is the very last day of STAPS observations, this daily image shows 12 hours of action of the Parkes single-dish during this project. As long as the sun is up, the telescope is seen to do short scans back and forth on some calibrator sources, but as soon as night falls, the telescope starts rocking for real. Today for the very last time. See also: http://www.outreach.atnf.csiro.au/visiting/parkes/parkeswebcam.html The next Daily Image will give a sneak preview into the data. |
| Copyright: | Parkes live |
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