<p>In this show I talk with Apostolos and Vasilis who I met at FOSDEM 2020 about the <a href="https://pictortelescope.com/">Pictor radio telescope</a> which they created and now maintain. Using free and open source software and hardware they have made a radio telescope that anyone can operate via a simple web page and which can return results to you within a minute or two. In fact you'll hear me get excited during the show when I realise this and submit an observation request, the results of which came back immediately and which you can see below.</p>
<p>To date Pictor has performed 3,500 observations from over 700 users from all around the world. Additionally, the PICTOR web platform is now equipped with a 3.2m antenna, which is about 4 times more sensitive than the previous 1.5m antenna, so users can observe the radio sky for free with an even more sensitive instrument.</p>
<p>On top of that, after 204 hours of integration time and over 3 TB of data, they have produced a Northern Sky Hydrogen (HI) Survey produced with the PICTOR Radio Telescope. This effort actually marks the very first radio-image obtained in Greece, shown here:</p>
<p><em>Pictor all sky images of hydrogen in our galaxy</em><br />
<a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr3243/img_001.png"><img src="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr3243/img_001_thumbnail.png" alt="Pictor all sky images of hydrogen in our galaxy" /></a></p>
<p>Here are the results of the observation I performed during the show. The body of the email pictor sent back to me confirms the observation I requested:</p>
<pre><code>Your observation has been carried out by PICTOR successfully!
Observation name: mcnalu first try
Observation datetime: 2020-12-08 12:40:09 (UTC+2)
Center frequency: 1420000000.0 Hz
Bandwidth: 2400000 Hz
Sample rate: 2400000 samples/sec
Number of channels: 2048
Number of bins: 100
Observation duration: 10 sec
Observation ID: 82937104
Your observation&#39;s averaged spectrum, dynamic spectrum (waterfall) and Power vs Time plot are attached in this email as an image.
</code></pre>
<p>And this is the plot attached to that email:</p>
<p><em>Graphs showing raw and corrected radio spectra for mcnalu's observation request</em><br />
<a href="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr3243/img_002.png"><img src="https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr3243/img_002_thumbnail.png" alt="Graphs showing raw and corrected radio spectra for mcnalu&#39;s observation request" /></a></p>
<p>Please do have a go at using Pictor and let us know how you got on by recording an HPR show.</p>
