MeerKAT Grand Tour - BLUSE (SETI) Notebooks

This is the table of contents for the BLUSE notebooks used for the MeerKAT Grand Tour workshop held at Rhodes University in Makhanda, Eastern Cape, South Africa in January 2023.

1. Voyager tutorials

   The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes emit extraterretrial technosignatures near 8.4 GHz. Despite being human-created, these signals are very useful as SETI test signals. If we can't detect these human-created technosignatures, we are unlikely to be able to detect ET-created technosignatures. Fortunately, we can detect Voyager and you can too using these notebooks!

   1. voyager_notebook_1.ipynb Voyager 1 data from the GBT
   2. voyager_notebook_2.ipynb Voyager 2 data from the Murriyang telescope (Parkes)
   3. voyager_notebook_3.ipynb Voyager 1 data from the GBT, with turboSETI

2. setigen notebook

   setigen is used to generate spectrogram data with embedded Doppler drifting signals as well as injecting simulated Doppler drifting signals into "real" data. This gives is a way to test our Doppler drifting detection algorithms (e.g. turboSETI). setigen can also inject RFI-like signals to give the simulated data a more realistic feel.

   You will use this setigen notebook to make your own simulated data with (or without if you prefer) Doppler drifting signals. This notebook will get you started with setigen, but you are encouraged to experiment and get creative with the signals you choose to inject!

   setigen_notebook_1.ipynb

   This notebook can save your simulated data (with injected signals) to disk so that you can exchange data files with your peers for use with the turboSETI notebook.

3. turboSETI notebook

   turboSETI is a tool for detecting Doppler drifting signals in radio spectrogtrams (e.g. Filterbank files). If one has several ON/OFF observations, find_event_pipeline can be used to determine whether "hits" are interesting (i.e. not consistent with RFI) or non-interesting (i.e. consistent with RFI).

   You will use this turboSETI notebook to search for Doppler drifting signals in data files that another student created using the setigen notebooks. The data files that you created with the setigen notebooks will be searched by another student using these same notebooks.

   turboseti_1.ipynb

   Can you and your peers detect each other's simulated signals? Can you detect your own?