Slow trawl

Excuses - excuses....

I've been asked how the data trawl is going.

Slowly.

Two reasons:

1/ Other pressures have been overwhelming. SETI work does not count for me in the Research Assessment Exercise we Brits have to go through every few years. I've therefore had to put time into other work which does count - the day job if you will. In fact I am lucky that my SETI work is tolerated in work time at all. But it is made clear to me that tolerance is one thing; counting the work as real research is quite another. Administrative work has also been horrendous.

2/ There is an overwhelming quantity of data. There are some geniuinely interesting things in the data, but not, I believe, ETI. I am currently chasing down some curious 'signals' which appear intermittently at just above noise, with periodicities corresponding to frequencies between 2 and 3kHz. These are supposedly, usually, invariably(?), dismissed as RFI or whatever, but they are nonetheless puzzling because they have quite pronounced dispersions. I'm getting to the point of producing a list of some strong examples, complete with waverforms determined through folding (some quite clean profiles after folding many thousands of periods into one).

another long silence

Well - it's been a while.

I've been caught up in a mountain of administration at the uni....
and had some holiday....
and had my office broken into and a machine stolen.... but fortunately not my star data.

I'm running a new search procedure over some data (on another machine) as I type this. I intend to post some images/graphs this week.

It's a long haul to get things sorted to know how best to work through 3 TB of data. So I'm still exploring...

SETI public/bioastro lists note a paper by Seth Shostak and Ray Villard on a targeting strategy for OSETI.

It's here.

The 'pulsars as beacons' strategy that I promote is also good for targeting OSETI.

Any OSETI amateurs out there with superfast optical signal detection equipment? It would be good to be able to report on Optical SETI as well as the Arecibo data processing..... Please get in touch....

At last! And I bet you thought it would never happen....

Background information (see Links in the sidebar) now in place.

This will be updated with a few more illustrations of different processing techniques, and then I will add links to files with graphs and processing details for each of the Habstars.

This forum is for commentary and discussion. If it gets abused then I'll have to moderate it.