Gallery

Telescopes and experiences

Our team has had experience with hands on instrumentation since day one. In this gallery we show some of the places where team members have worked, collaborate with or been in the past years. These sites are in Chile and abroad, and include long radio wavelengths, millimeter wavelengths, optical telescopes, and site testing with instruments.

Algonquin Radio Observatory 46-m telescope

Algonquin Radio Observatory 10-m telescope

Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) radio dish

CHIME/FRB Outrigger at Green Bank Observatory

CHIME/FRB Outrigger telescope at GBO. CHIME/FRB Outrigger telescope located at Green Bank Observatory (GBO) facility, WV US. A CHIME/FRb Outrigger is a CHIME-like cylinder tilted and pointing towards CHIME's zenith sky location. The Outrigger is a 20-m diameter cylinder with 256 dual-polarization feeds, and a 400--800 MHz bandwidth. Our team closely collaborates with the CHIME/FRB Collaboration, with a particular emphasis in correlation algorithms and detecting fast radio bursts (FRB) in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). These type of observations are fundamental to understand the cosmic origins of these millisecond duration events. Further, their observation in VLBI is very complex, their sky position and duration make observing them, simultaneously with two or more radio telescopes an instrumental challenge. The CHIME/FRB Collaboration has already been able to cross-correlate and localize on-off events (Cassanelli, Leung, & Sanghavi et al. 2023) and soon will find thousands of localized FRBs.

CHARTS. The Canadian-Chilean array for radio transient studies (CHARTS) will be a 256-element interferometer located in Laguna Carén (picture showing the actual site). The site is isolated from the public deep within the park and capable to host the entire array equipment (~20 m x 20 m). Our team will operate the facility fully remotely, minimizing the impact on the park reserve, in an automated system to classify and detect transient signals at long radio wavelengths.

Digitizer. Digitizers, such as the RFSoC 4x2 Xilinx AMD boards, are a key piece for any radio astronomical facility. In particular, these new technologies are extremely flexible, letting us program the hardware to our convenince. Based on software of the CASPER Collaboration we will adapt these digitizers for the CHARTS project.

CHARTS Pathfinder Telescope. The CHARTS pathfinder telescope or CPT is our antenna prototype at Cerro Calán. The 3-m dish (RF-HAMDESIGN) will be a testbed for future implementations in hardware and software for the upcoming project CHARTS. The antenna can be fully controlled remotely, perform narrowband observtions, and monitor low frequencies from 300 MHz to 1 GHz. In addition, the 3-m will host the first correlations for the transient experiment.