SETI & Crunching news

Berkeley SETI Research Center is holding a fundraiser to raise $7000 to send our student interns to conferences to present their work.

We’ve been working with some great students at Berkeley SETI, and we’re optimistic that some of them will become the scientists and engineers who lead the field in future and maybe even find the signal we’re searching for. In the meantime they have been doing amazing work and we’d like to send them to academic conferences to present their results, and for their own professional development. If you would like to help with this effort, we are running a crowdfunding campaign at https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/SETItravel - every donation counts! We also have some fun perks including the chance to ask questions to members of the Berkeley SETI team, and to attend a party in our lab.

Although this does not directly benefit SETI@home (our annual fundraiser will start in a couple weeks), it's a worthy cause. I'll be contributing!

I've been asked by several people to post a status update on the situation at Arecibo following hurricane Maria's passage.

Unfortunately, at this point we haven't gotten any news. The last information we have is from a couple hours prior to when the eye passed Arecibo. That report said all the employees were accounted for and in sheltered buildings.

Since then we've had no news. That's understandable. With power out on the whole island, electronics communications aren't going to be possible for some time. Heavy rains are still expected today, so I'm sure that the primary concern is still keeping everyone safe. Assessment of any damage will take time.

Let's hope that everyone is safe, that their homes are intact, and that any damage can be repaired quickly.

For those who didn't recognize the name KIC8462852 in their work unit names, this data comes from GBT observations of Tabby's Star (aka Boyajian's Star, aka WTF-0001, aka the Weirdest star in the galaxy). This is not yet the full data set, which lives at Penn State, it's some test on-target/off-target observations that we're checking out.

You might also notice another change. We've doubled the size of our work units which will reduce our quantization noise by 34%, and, depending on the strength of other noise sources, could give us as much as double that as a sensitivity increase.

The UC Berkeley Space Science Laboratory Domain Name Services (DNS) server has been having problems for the past 24 hours, and a wildlands fire near the Space Sciences Lab has prevented SSL personnel from fixing the problem.

Because of this, any server functions (i.e. password reset, forum notifications) that require email interaction are not working for most people.

If the problems continue tomorrow its likely that BOINC clients will eventually lose access to the SETI@home servers until the DNS server can be repaired.

SETI.Germany is again organizing this Year's event in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Wow! Signal. Further information can be found here. The event will run from Aug 15th, 4.00 UTC to Aug 29th 2017, 4.00 UTC.

Ryan Lynch works on pulsar research at the Green Bank Observatory. In this video, we sat down with Ryan to chat about how to paint the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and what modern convenience he misses most while living in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

https://youtu.be/fF9JaLyWuUI

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We took a GoPro Omni 360 VR camera up to the top of the Green Bank Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Join us on Part 1 of our journey, as we check out the telescope wheels that each carry more than a million pounds of weight, and learn about the 2004 individually controllable panels that make up the surface of the dish, which is larger than a football stadium.