Aquila Radio Observatory
Hi, I am Ayushman Tripathi, an amateur using SDR hardware and open-source tools to do genuine 21 cm radio astronomy from a remote, low-RFI site.
What this is
A 24/7 live feed from my homebuilt 2.4 m radio telescope at a remote, low-RFI site, listening to the Milky Way at 1420 MHz: the hydrogen line. What you see is real data, the spectrum and waterfall updating live as the sky drifts through the beam. Nothing is staged or picked for appearance. When the beam is pointed away from the galactic plane, the line is small, because that is what the sky is doing.
Amateur SETI
The same capture that gives me the hydrogen line also feeds a SETI search: narrowband detection, RFI discrimination and drift-rate analysis, running on the 2.4 m dish and on a Ku-band dish. The odds are tiny, but the search is fun. More posts are coming soon on the amateur SETI setup and how it works.
On this site
- 24/7 live hydrogen-line spectrum and waterfall
- Real drift-scan data from the Milky Way
- Where each dish is pointing on the sky, right now
- How it works: SDR, LNA, feed, calibration, RFI hunting (posts to follow)
Some of my work
- My open-source H-line pipeline: github.com/ayushman-t/h-line-observer
- Hydrogen line observations on Zenodo: zenodo.org/records/18847536
The instruments
- 2.4 m mesh prime-focus dish, L-band. Hydrogen line plus the SETI drift search, from one capture.
- 0.9 m grid dish, L-band. A second, continuous hydrogen-line loop.
- Ku offset dish, 10.7 to 11.7 GHz. Hopping narrowband drift survey, locked to an external frequency reference.
Frequency: 1420.405751 MHz
Location: a remote, low-RFI site
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Carl Sagan