Quote:
Originally Posted by mswhin63
Although radio astronomy has been around for a while, the long wavelengths have been difficult to manipulate to get easily readable data. I personally think Radio Astronomy is more an engineering solution in the effort to get data that is usable enough to place in visual form.
Anyway the technology is very difficult to intermix with the science and therefore difficult to understand. I originally started to do a double degree in Electronics Engineering and Physics but had to go back to a single degree
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An interesting Perspective, Malcolm, and much more of an "insider's" view than mine (which was arrived at by reading scientific papers written by radio astronomers.)
You confirm, in my mind, the very great complexity and cost of the
process of actually making the observations in radio astronomy. It is a long way from what comes in at the receiver to the actually useable data of the sort that an astronomer might publish!
Making discoveries in astronomy is always hard to do, and I suspect that the added complexity of the technology & physics & engineering of radio telescopes may have the effect of reducing the amount of time that radio astronomers actually have to pore over their data. (radio astronomers will struggle mightily sometimes, just to produce data about a single galaxy; so radio astronomy must be a harder game than optical astronomy!)