Week Three

As Dori would say in a singsong voice...

Just Keep Learning, Just Keep Learning

There will not be much to this blog entry. We obviously spent as much time working towards our goal as in previous weeks, but it was deep in information. Lots of un-blog-worthy information.

Lectures- A Tale of Two IntenCities

Class One - SIGNALS and SYSTEMS

The intensity of the course was high. In 10 one-hour lectures, we were getting a glimpse of the West Virginia Univ third year course, Electrical Engineering
EE 327-Signals and Systems. The nature of Digital Signal Processing is deeply mathematical, and to fully appreciate it, one has to be deep in that math as well. We have to thank these students who have walked through EE programs to become professional engineers and make the use of our cell phones, computer, Wi-Fi so information rich. For the 4 of us high school science teachers with various backgrounds, it was fast and furious.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the WVU course catalog to see what a student would have to take to get to this course (The required courses are called Prerequisite Courses...People who have gone to college know then, HS students will learn about them). I created the following graphic Prerequisite tree. The Signals course, we saw in digest version, is at the top, and the arrows point to courses that need to be taken previously to this course. And those courses' Prereqs are also shown.

PreRequisite Tree for Signal Course

I would say that I was rather fortunate since I have experienced all the Math and Physics courses on that list, even though I could claim nearly 30 years since seeing some of it. It was still a work out to follow along with some sense of understanding. If the goal was for us to appreciate the depth of the math behind the things we take for granted in today's technological society, then mission accomplished.

Class Two - ASTRONOMY

For me, I felt I was watching a fellow astronomy teacher. Much of the material presented was stuff that I cover in both my high school astronomy course and the college course I teach at Marist. There was one day the lecture on Dark Matter was so close to my own lecture that I had to laugh. I showed the professor my Power Point for my lecture and we shared at least 3 of the same exact images. This was like a mental cool down exercise after the intense mental workout of the Signals lecture.

The last two lectures did leave the realm of the introductory course as we tackled the math of what to do with our data that we will receive with our scope. Basically, once the data is processed by the engineers, the scientists have to figure out was to do with it. It is a symbiotic relationship!

We will be getting data of the radio emissions of neutral hydrogen in our own galaxy. It will be red-shifted or blue-shifted due to the Doppler Effect. Many of us know Doppler Radar from the Weather Channel, or any weather report. It tells how fast clouds are moving and in which direction. It has been very effective is earlier Tornado Detection helping warn people with more time to spare. Another common example is that a traffic officer will use a Doppler gun to bounce radio waves off travelling cars to determine how fast the car is going.

doppler-effect

We will do the same thing to see how fast the gas clouds are going. However, unlike an officer who sits stationary in the car while doing the detection, we will be rotating on the Earth (velocity 1), which is revolving around the Sun (velocity 2), all of which is orbiting the Galaxy (velocity 3)...while we try to detect gas motion behind us, in front of us, and to the side. This leads to a lot of fun algebra.

...Last time, we left our Heroes...

Putting the Horns Together...Some Assembly Required

At the end of week two, we had all our parts ready for assembly. It was quick work in our Monday Lab session to get everything together and get outside to see if they could see what we couldn't see...(I hope you know I mean Radio Waves!)

Stand

Horn

Quick swivel cross bracing for extra stability

New Horn Holder

1-2-3-4-5-6...Mission Accomplished

Testing Horns to see if they see H

Oh say CAN you see

Into the Gaping Maw

Oh No! John get out!

GNU Radio Lab ...continued

We continued the march forward to understanding enough to eventually build our Hydrogen Spectrometer for our Horn Scopes. The goal is to be able to have our spectrometer by early next week (Tues?). Filters, Low Pass, FFT, Vector to Stream, Quad Demodulator, Multiply Conjugate...

I took very few pictures. We are obviously working towards looking at Radio Waves, but Sound Waves are waves and they can be received, filtered, amplified, sent out to speakers...all the same concepts.

Sounds nice....

....but what does it look like

Teaching on the Horizon

On Wednesday, we had a video call meeting with Sue Ann Heatherley from Green Bank Observatory. She is in charge of the educational aspects at GBO, including our program, but more importantly, the upcoming Summer Camp program at GBO. We arrive for a two week stay on Monday, the campers arrive for a two week stay on Monday. They are some of the top 9th grade science students from West Virginia (Be careful non-WV'ers) We have a 2.5 hour time slot for teaching Signal Processing on Tuesday. We are to design a 2-day, 5 hour course, that we will run through 3 groups of campers. That's 6 days of teaching obligation in the late mornings. We are also working on at least one additional seminar on how to put the Horn Scopes together.

The Governor's STEM Institute

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