We received a nice note from the SETI@Home project:
Dear O’Grady’s PowerPage SETI@home Team:
Armed with the results of 1.4 million years of computer time,
SETI@home scientists recently traveled to the Arecibo radio observatory
in Puerto Rico for a closer listen to our 155 top “candidates”.
Thanks for participating in this history-making effort.
Your contribution of computer time to SETI@home is greatly appreciated.
For some quick stats about Team PowerPage, Read more…
We received a nice note from the SETI@Home project:
Dear O’Grady’s PowerPage SETI@home Team:
Armed with the results of 1.4 million years of computer time,
SETI@home scientists recently traveled to the Arecibo radio observatory
in Puerto Rico for a closer listen to our 155 top “candidates”.
Thanks for participating in this history-making effort.
Your contribution of computer time to SETI@home is greatly appreciated.
Some quick stats about Team PowerPage
- Members: 1190
- Results received: 777666
- Total CPU time: 1442.215 years
Qsilver maintains our SETI@Home stats page. Download the Mac OS X (GUI or command line) client and join our team today.
More from the email:
Scientific News
—————
On March 18, three SETI@home scientists (Paul Demorest, Eric Korpela,
and Dan Werthimer) traveled to the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico,
carrying a list of 300 “candidates” – points in the sky
where interesting signals were detected by SETI@home
not just once but several times over 4 years of observation.
We had been granted 24 hours of telescope time,
in three 8-hour periods on consecutive days.
An unexpected storm of solar flares cancelled
our 2nd and 3rd observing periods.
Fortunately, the observatory staff was able to shuffle the schedule and
we eventually observed for the full 24 hours.
In the end, we were able to re-observe 155 SETI@home candidates.
We also observed some other interesting places in the sky:
5 extrasolar planetary systems, 35 nearby Sun-like stars,
15 galaxies, and 6 targets from our companion project, SERENDIP.
These observations are of higher quality than usual, because
1) we used Arecibo’s main antenna, the “Gregorian dome”,
which has a narrower beam and greater sensitivity
than the receiver we normally use; and
2) we recorded in 8 bit per sample resolution in addition
to the usual 2 bit format.
We did a quick “on the fly” analysis of the data;
this didn’t reveal any synthetic extraterrestrial signals.
The analysis of the 2-bit data will begin shortly,
using the regular SETI@home screensaver;
we’re ironing out some problems with the pointing data.
The analysis of the 8-bit data will be done using a
new version of SETI@home which is under development,
and will be released later this summer.
The Planetary Society web site has an excellent summary of the reobservations:
http://planetary.org/stellarcountdown/index.html
Our web site lists the reobservation targets
and the 7,000 users whose computations directly contributed to finding them:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/candidates.html
A photo album from the trip is here:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/arecibo_2003/
Project News
————
The reobservation project is a milestone for SETI@home
but it is not an stopping point.
In fact, the recent candidate list reflects only about half the
data we’ve analyzed so far, and we hope to have another reobservation
session next year.
Our current top priority is shifting SETI@home to use BOINC
(Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing).
BOINC will allow us to start analyzing the 8-bit data,
and we’ll use it for 2-bit data as well.
This new version of SETI@home is still under development,
but a preview of its screensaver graphics is here:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/setiathome.jpg
We hope you’re as excited as we are about our search for life outside Earth.
Thanks for your continued participation and support.
Dr. David P. Anderson
Project Director, SETI@home
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu
