Welcome
The Palen Radio Observatory, or PRO, is an undergraduate run radio observatory at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. The observatory's purpose is to provide undergrads of various disciplines the opportunity to learn about not only radio astronomy, but programming, engineering, and general research techniques as well. The observatory is in fact the only avenue currently available at the university for learning about radio astronomy.
The heart of the observatory is a 2.3 meter SRT telescope kit located on the top of the Atmospheric Sciences building here at the UW. The receiver is tuned to the neutral Hydrogen 21 centimeter line (1.42 GHz), and has a range around that value of 430 MHz. We are able to do spectroscopy and doppler shift measurements by tuning in 40 kHz steps. The telescope is controlled by java software that is bundled with the kit. Data reduction here at the UW is accomplished with IDL.
Current research goals include an all-sky survey, and the author's pet project, a rotation curve for the Milky Way.
The history of our observatory has been described much more completely than I could ever manage over at the PRO wiki , which in fact is where all the nuts and bolts information and documentation of our exploits is maintained.
Contact: For more information, contact davidkr at astro dot washington dot edu