Daily Image
27-01-2025
A windy day and a sunny day
| Submitter: | Cees Bassa |
| Description: | These two images were taken last Friday (left), showing storm Eowyn after it had passed over Ireland and Scotland, and last Sunday (right), when the clouds finally parted over the Netherland to reveal the Sun. These images are transmitted by the Russian Meteor M2-4 satellite, one of a half dozen weather satellites in low-Earth (800km) polar orbits which image a strip of Earth directly below them and transit this data down to Earth at frequencies between 137 to 138MHz. Anyone with a simple antenna and some software can demodulate and decode these transmissions to create images like these. These frequencies fall inside the LOFAR HBA band, and thanks to the flexibility of the new software on the LOFAR2.0 stations, it is now possible to point the beams created from the antennas within an HBA tile and between HBA tiles to the location of the satellite in the sky during the 15 to 20 minute pass over the Netherlands. The 72kHz transmissions fall within a LOFAR subband, and the data for these observation is recorded on COBALT. The demodulation and decoding is done offline. |
| Copyright: | Cees Bassa, on behalf of the LOFAR2.0 AIVV and commissioning teams |
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