The image above from http://www.globalwarmingart.com/.
There was an almost audible sigh of relief among solar enthusiasts in January
2008 when it was announced that the new 11 year Solar Cycle had officially begun
with appearance of a small magnetically reversed small sunspot. And
while technically yes the new cycle had begun, it was with less than a
whimper. Since that time a full year ago very little solar activity has
been seen. The transition from Cycle #23 to Cycle #24 is not
instantaneous. There can be sunspots that have characteristics of each
cycle present at the same time. Such was the case in late October 2008
when four spots appeared from Cycle #24 but also one straggler from Cycle #23
developed.
The image above from http://www.globalwarmingart.com/.
So when can we expect the new cycle to really take off? Well it is possible that it might not take off at all! What? People have been counting sunspots since the early 1600s, but there was period from about 1645 to 1715 when very few spots were seen. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named for solar astronomer Edward W. Maunder (1851–1928) who recognized the phenomena in the historical records. Much is made from the fact that this is also the time of the "Little Ice Age" where global weather grew much colder than normal. Whether the two are related is unknown. A second period of reduced activity that occurred during the early 1800s is known as the Dalton Minimum. There is no evidence that anything like another Maunder Minimum is upon us, but the possibility is interesting to ponder. NASA scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center produced a prediction (below) for the new based upon several methods that looked at such things as the geomagnetic indices and the number of days that the geomagnetic field was disturbed in the previous cycle. Below is a graph of their prediction for the 10.7 cm radio flux. The Sun has been observed at this frequency daily since 1947.
Space weather as it is now called is a very new science compared to meteorology.
We can expect its predictive power to remain quite low for some time to
come. If the weather does turn stormy, will you be ready to observe it at
your observatory?
Jupiter and solar observers may have seen some of the great spectrograms produced by the WCCRO and UFRO (currently located at the Radio Alachua observatory) spectrographs. These instruments were designed by Richard Flagg and me several years ago using a frequency sweeping receiver technique. The spectra generally run from 18 to 28 MHz though other ranges can be selected. The images can be viewed in real time using free software and an internet connection. In 2008, I rebuilt the software so that it can utilize the SDR-14 receiver offered by RF-Space. I could not have done this without the donation of an instrument by Jupiter scientist Kazu Imai. In return, Dr. Imai is now able to save spectra 24 hours a day from his radiotelescope. The software supplied with the SDR-14 is very good but produces huge files and is a bit awkward for some types of observations. We reduce the spectrum to 200 discrete frequency channels saved at about 10 times per second. This is the same data rate that we use at WCCRO and the UFRO with our sweeping receivers.
This summer I used the SDR-14 and the new software to observe Jupiter. The picture above shows some of the Jupiter emissions I observed. Conditions were not the best but I was successful on several occasions. A couple of observers were able to connect to my data remotely and view it in real time, though this requires some internet bandwidth to accomplish. The antenna used was a home built wire and stick log periodic dipole array. The SDR-14 is a fabulous instrument and I look forward to many great experiments with it. The software remains free for this use. If you buy an SDR-14 drop me a line and I will tell how to mate the software and your receiver.
For several years now I have had some involvement along with Richard Flagg in running a small radio observatory remotely. Most of the time everything runs just fine. On rare occasions we have someone at the location manually reboot a PC. Recently, I have been working getting my own observatory ready for remote operation. For this location however, it would be much harder to have someone come in and manually reset something, so I have had to put a bit more thought into dealing with computer problems and power failures. First lets address some of the basics about how you might handle an observatory remotely. I am going to assume the observatory has internet access in some form.
In the days of Windows 95/98 dependability was well .. terrible. Windows Xp has brought about a great improvement in stability. Without external problems arising (hardware failure, for example) I would say Windows has achieved at least the level of dependability claimed by Linux users. If you want to run your observatory on a Win95/98 PC, good luck, but it probably won't work for long. I am not sure how Vista will work for you with all of its terribly intrusive questioning of everything you try to do. If you have a copy of Xp, I would stick with that. If your PC sits behind a router you will want to assign a fixed IP address to it so that the LAN address is not changed by DHCP in the router.
You will need to have some way to manage programs on your PC remotely. There is a Remote Assistance utility built into Xp but my understanding is that an "invitation" must be sent by the client to initiate this kind of connection... no good for our purposes where the client is unattended. There are a number of other programs but VNC from realvnc.com is available in a very functional free version. Download and install VNC on your observatory computer(s) and configure the program to run as a Windows Service that starts when Windows is booted. You will be prompted for this during the installation procedure. Make sure you tell your Windows Firewall and any firewalls or anti-virus that you may be running to allow remote connections to VNC's server program. VNC uses port 5900 for connections by default. You may want to change that to another port number for security sake, but make sure you document this. Also document the password you select. In fact, document everything on paper. You may think you remember everything but in a few weeks those details will fade. Set up port forwarding in your router to pass connections on the VNC port to the observatory PC. Test the system from another computer outside of your network using VNC Viewer software. But how do you do that if your internet side IP changes? You can set up a free account with NO-IP that keeps track of your internet IP address and allows you to access it using a permanent domain name URL. For example, I set up a domain name radiosky.no-ip.info. Now to access my system remotely I just have to remember this instead of some unwieldy numerical name. If my IP address changes, a small client program reports this to the NO-IP folks so they can associate the new IP with my domain name. You should set up this client program to start up as a Windows Service so that it will be ready to go when your PC reboots. Now access the observatory computer you can just enter your NO-IP provided domain name into the VNC Viewer along with your VNC password. Awesome!
Now can control your observatory computer remotely. But what happens if you have a power outage? If you use an intelligent UPS like my Tripp Lite you can have the UPS software shut down the computer smoothly after the UPS battery reaches some set level of discharge. The Tripp Lite PowerAlert software can even email messages reporting problems and alerts. Make sure you don't have any applications running that are stubborn about closing. Adobe software is notorious about refusing to close smoothly as is Norton Anti-Virus. Test the system by pulling the plug to the UPS to the wall AC outlet. None of this will be helpful unless your computer reboots when the power is restored. This requires that you go into your computer's BIOS setup and configure it to power on automatically if the AC current is restored. Consult your computers manual if you don't know how to get into the BIOS settings. Be careful. You may also have to configure your UPS if you use one to automatically turn itself back on upon a power restore.
You ideally would like to have all of the programs that run your observatory to start automatically when the system reboots. You can place shortcuts in your Startup menu to facilitate this. In the case of Radio-SkyPipe you can create a shortcut to the Radio-SkyPipe AutoRun program. This program can start the chart automatically in whatever mode you desire. If you have programs that can accept command line options to startup in given modes you can create a "bat" file that starts these programs along with their options. You would then create a shortcut to the bat file in the Startup menu. Radio Eyes software was designed for remote control of a radiotelescope. The Telescope Control Point Program can reside at your observatory and you can talk to it from the main Radio Eyes graphical interface from somewhere else. Whatever programs you are running on the observatory computer they need to be free from prompts that will require a human response. This should be true even in case of a program error if possible. In Radio-SkyPipe you can turn off error messages under Options / Logging. If you write your own software keep this issue in mind.
Finally I would like to address the problem of how to handle it if the computer "hangs" and you cannot get into it with VNC. In this case to need another route into your system. An X-10 phone-based hardware system could be used. In this case you call you phone and dial in a given code to perhaps drop the power to the PC. There are a number of devices in the $100 to $200 range that can be activated by ringing the phone a settable number of times. My hope was to avoid using the phone for signaling as I would like to keep it call forwarded when I am not at the observatory. I am working on an inexpensive hardware solution but that will have to wait for a future article.
It has been about nine years since the first release of Radio-SkyPipe data collection software and finally we have evolved to version 2. This new version represents a major improvement in many aspects of the program. A list of major new features includes:
A free version is still available. If you currently own the Pro version of RSP 1.X, you can upgrade to RSP 2 for only $24.95
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