Yo!
Hope you enjoyed going through all the projects proposed so far. You can find the part-2 of the series here.Now comes the more exciting part of the projects: Long term ones!
We came up with a set of projects, which can take some time and effort to finish- mind you, when I say tough, I mean it. They are time consuming. But the results will more than make up for the same!
So here goes the list:
- Listening to meteors: Ever wondered whether you can listen to meteors ? I ain’t kidding you, but it can be done. Has been done. And we will try to emulate that!
So how do your T.V waves come about in the “T.V”? Seen things like VHF, UHF, etc? So, these are called bands, as in bands of frequencies. So we can use these principles of “frequencies” and try to differentiate between meteors and other stuff. Don’t believe me? Check this and this link. They will give you an idea of what has been done. We will do something similar, and the feel of astronomer you get- listening to these frequencies- is totally out of the world. - Augmented reality SkEye: Now-a-days, a device called Occulus Rift is making rounds in the public, which maps a software called Stellarium to the “Google glasses” to give a 3-D view of the space. The ideal space. So, we had the idea- why not map on the “ideal space” or the celestial bodies’ location to your camera, so that when you face your smartphone towards the sky, you can see the location of everything hidden behind the atmosphere, and accurately time the rise and set of the same. And going a step ahead, “Augment” SkEye to camera to have your live background, but with all the star, planets, etc present. Sounds interesting? Check this app which some guys made for ios.
- Radio telescope: Wow. A radio telescope of your own. You can listen to pulsars and Neutron stars and put N pseud, get plots and calculate their masses and all. Sounds pseud enough? No? How about making it portable, and going to some hill station and spend time getting readings, analyzing data and map them and make your own catalog?
So, IUCAA (Inter university center for astronomy and astrophysics) came up with this idea of portable radio telescope. Go through this and then only come for the project. - Astrophotography project: Ever wondered how the beautiful pics of Milky way, and such ground based images are taken? If so, we have proposed a project- take the pictures and process them. In a place like Chennai, with heavy pollution, we cannot hope to get a decent picture. But if we go to the outskirts, with sufficient fight, we can get some decent pics and process them. We will start from Jupiter to Saturn to… well ,maybe end up in the Milky Way!
So that concludes the series of projects proposed this year. Enthu people can contact me through this reply, or send me a mail! Contact details, will, however be put up on the smail!
Details and Abstractions 