Updated February 14, 2004

The Sky Scan Science Awareness Project is an initiative of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC), Edmonton Centre, and the Department of Physics at the University of Alberta. The Edmonton Area Radio Astronomy Group (EARAG) is a committee of the Edmonton RASC and has charitable organization status.

Our purpose is to use radio astronomy as a means of carrying out public science education in the province of Alberta, Canada. For more information about the Sky Scan project, follow this link ... Sky Scan. Or follow the link buttons on our home page to areas that interest you.

Radio Astronomy has certain advantages for our purposes, including the fact that observing programs are unaffected by weather or daylight. Automation permits us to stay indoors, rather than freeze our bodies in the -40C winters we get up here. For a detailed introduction to Radio Astronomy check out NASA's Basics of Radio Astronomy site.

With the advent of Canadian Direct To Home satellite television broadcasting, we saw many large C band dishes falling into disrepair/disuse. Rather than see this valuable resource go to waste, we started collecting these unused dishes & hardware, with the intent of building our own long baseline interferometers. Unfortunately, most of us have small yards, so putting multiple dishes into our back yards became problematic.

We approached the Department of Physics of the University of Alberta about the possibility of hosting these recycled dishes on the roof of their building, and were met with good support. 

We now  have several dish mounts (4)  installed on the roof of the Physics Building and will eventually be installing the 12' dishes we have collected for use by Physics students. Hopefully a few weeks after that we will be doing useful science as the University of Calgary Radio Astronomy Society, Berkeley U and the University of Indianapolis have done.

As part of the 'public education' component of our work we hope to have our results available on the web.

VOLUNTEERS WANTED:

We are also looking for volunteers to work on the many aspects of this project. If you have programming skills, RF expertise, or mechanical skills, we'd love to hear from you. It's fun, educational, and very satisfying.