About
PICTOR
PICTOR, located in Athens, Greece, consists of a 1.5-meter parabolic antenna that allows anyone to make continuous and spectral (i.e. hydrogen line) drift-scan observations of the radio sky in the 1300~1700 MHz regime for free.
The goal of this effort is to introduce students, educators, astronomers and others to the majesty of the radio sky, promoting radio astronomy education, without the need of building a large and expensive antenna.
PICTOR is a fully open source (software & hardware) project: https://github.com/0xCoto/PICTOR
Technical
Details
Telescope diameter: 1.5m (4.92 ft = 59.05")
Focal Ratio (F/D): 0.411 (prime focus antenna)
Beamwidth (HPBW @ 1420 MHz): ~8.95° (k factor = 63.64)
Operating frequency range: 1300~1700 MHz (L band)
Two-stage low-noise amplifier (LNA): Gain: 30 ± 2 dB - Noise figure (NF): < 0.5 dB
High-pass filter: -30 dBc below 900 MHz
Third-stage LNA (used as an in-line amplifier): Gain: > 9 dB *
Band-pass filter: f_center = 1420 MHz (designed for hydrogen line observations) *
Instantaneous bandwidth (IBW): up to 3.2 MHz (sufficient for spectral observations) [to be upgraded to 30.72 MHz]
Number of channels: up to 2048 (for high frequency-resolution observations) [to be upgraded to 16384]
* Deemed unnecessary hence removed
Contact
PICTOR was created by Apostolos Misirlis and Vasilis Misirlis.
Feel free to contact us regarding feedback, suggestions, questions, or any other inquiry!
Email: [email protected]
Discord: Apostolos#6329
Skype: coto993
GitHub: https://github.com/0xCoto
© PICTOR Telescope
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
