2.3m radio telescope

IMPORTANT NOTE

This page is still kept open, mainly to continue providing online resources for the local community. However the PI of the telescope is no longer working at KNU. Thus any practical details related to the access and usage of the radio telescope should be addressed to the department of astronomy and atmospheric science at KNU.

Currently (as of Sep 2024), the 2.3m telescope at Kyungpook National University (KNU) was decommissioned due to construction work on the department building's roof. As soon as the construction finishes, the telescope will be brought back to assembly and operation. Also, the PI of the telescope (Jae-Young Kim at UNIST, Korea) is no longer working at KNU. Thus the long-term plan is to move the telescope from KNU to UNIST --  administrative efforts are ongoing, so please stay tuned for updates about the telescope.

Introduction

In Feb 2023, the astronomy major at Kyungpook National University installed a new 2.3m radio telescope, operating at 1420 MHz (1.4 GHz, centered at the 21cm neutral hydrogen line) and observing in dual circular polarization. The telescope is the SPIDER 230C model from Radio2Space, an Italy-based company. The details are provided on their product web page. The telescope will be primarily used for undergraduate/graduate education on observational astronomy (e.g., mapping the galactic plane hydrogens) and research, especially for finding and monitoring flaring events of bright radio sources such as blazars. A short presentation given in summer 2023 to provide a very brief introduction to the telescope is here.

This page is intended to provide details of the performance, observations, and data reduction of the 2.3m radio telescope. In the first half of 2023, the telescope will undergo various tests for performance and calibration measurements. Therefore, information on this page will be frequently updated on a non-regular basis. When the telescope performance is verified and it can operate stably, we also plan to open a limited amount of telescope time for potential users outside our astronomy major. Please contact me if you want to use our telescope for education/training/research in your departments or institutes.

The purchase, installation, and maintenance of the 2.3m radio telescope system was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (Ministry of Science and ICT; grant no. 2022R1C1C1005255; PI Jae-Young Kim).

Useful literature and memos

• Official manual for the installation and maintenance of SPIDER 230C (link) and the user manual for the RadioUniversePRO software (link). The latter is the main program for operating the 2.3m radio telescope. Note that these materials can also be obtained from the product web page (see above).

• A research article on solar eclipse observations with SPIDER 300A (link): The authors share their experience with observing with SPIDER 300C and briefly discuss the calibration and data reduction.

• Small Radio Telescope (SRT) reference page from the MIT Haystack (link): Although the design of the SRT is different from SPIDER 230C, the project web page shares many valuable materials, such as memos and block diagrams. Those are closely related to the engineering and calibration perspectives of SPIDER 230C.

• (Also important) Manuals for the installation and operation of the mount unit, RST-300, can be obtained here.

Pictures

Below are some pictures from when the telescope was assembled and installed in our department with the help of Metaspace, and during recent test works.