About
ERA is the Educational Radio Array radio telescope sited at the SPIRIT observatory south of Perth.
ERA is a 50 antenna radio telescope array built primarily for education and outreach purposes. The array is a fully functional radio interferometer and supports programs exploring:
- The electromagnetic (EM) spectrum
- the radio properties of the sun
- wave propagation and wave interference
- fundamentals of radio interferometry
- radio astronomy imaging and beamforming
Important Links
For high school student projects, we will be doing most of our work in a sandboxed python environment called Jupyter Lab notebook.
Jupyter Lab workspace
The Jupyter Lab environment will need the notebook file below to be uploaded.
ERA-Lesson.ipynb
The data that ERA has collected for you need to be downloaded and unzipped into a folder.
ERA Data for 2023-07-19
We will be checking our data against the solar observatory in Learmonth, Western Australia.
Learmonth Observatory
The Telescope
ERA is a radio telescope array with 50 antennas arranged in a perturbed Reuleaux triangle configuration with diameter approximately 35m. The array uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products for many of the components including antennas and receivers. The ERA antennas are optimised for 320-330 MHz, which includes the 325-327 MHz band that has some protections for radio astronomy.
The antennas for ERA are 3-element Yagis fixed pointing at the zenith. The antennas, by design, see a large fraction of the visible sky (similar in concept to SKA-Low antennas), so ERA is sensitive to signals from a large fraction of the sky, and signals from specific radio sources can be isolated by radio astronomy imaging or beamforming.
Technical Information
Student Projects
Contact Information
General and technical inquiries: A/Prof Randall Wayth.
ICRAR Outreach & Education coordinator: Ms Leah Kalimeris.
SPIRIT coordinator: Mr Tim Young.