Awesome sounds of radio (astronomy)

If you're anything like me, you'll be fascinated, and maybe a little bit fearful, of radio astronomy. At first the big dishes make it seem so inaccessible, yet somehow understandable – that big collector bounces so much of those faint, well-travelled signals, to make the audible. After that though, you're left mystified. What's the next bit of the chain? How and what do you listen to?

The more you read up, indeed the more you just listen to the radio, you learn it can be on familiar territory. Jupiter can be heard around 20 MHz – that's shortwave, any old radio can tune there!

And then there's meteor showers. A smear of a distant TV channel, or a snatch of FM radio from the other side of the continent, is at times because (as I understand it) the signals are twisted by the fuzz of ionisation surrounding a meteor as it dashes through the earth's atmosphere at some point in between and above you and that radio station.

But radio astronomers, professional and amateur, can do something more structured.

Have a look at what this guy, Thomas Ashcroft does. This recording is of one of the most well known meteor showers, Geminids, at VHF, and it is compelling. Trust me, this is awesome.

There are two channels of audio, about 20MHz apart, recorded in the narrowest of modes, CW (that's how you get Morse code), and yet they interact.

Poke around that website, there's lots of good stuff – binaural representations of electromagnetic radiation. He also has receivers recording 300KHz apart around 21MHz for Jupiter, and VLF and ELF – that's 0 - 20 KHz.