The Lociscope

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The reason that there are 540 (rather than 600) 100mS readings per minute is because I use a servo to rotate "the receiver" through 180 degrees every 54 seconds. The other six seconds are used to return the device to point at the North Star. In this way, a line though the two zener diodes sweeps a path from the North Star, vertically across the sky, to the Southern Cross and back again, every minute. As the earth rotates on it's axis, the entire cosmos is scanned once a day. 

A 100mS average of the differences squared of the two zener rates (sampled each mS)  is plotted with 540 vertical points, corresponding to the distance from the ecliptic (Declination), and 1440 horizontal points, corresponding to the time of day (Right Ascension). The color of each point corresponds to the amount of agreement between the rates of the two zener diodes, with red being good agreement (lower values) and blue being poor agreement (higher values). There should be no preferred direction that effects the amount of agreement, so the graph is expected to be homogenous and/or random in nature. I have finished building this thing and it is time to give it a name. Since it views the cosmos using two point sources, I'm calling it a Lociscope (Lō-kī-skōp).

Viewing the Cosmos

The servo is a little shaky as it scans. I am watching the first 24 hour image build. The image is composed of mostly light green pixels in the mid value range with randomly scattered red, yellow and blue pixels. In the afternoon, there were some broad and diffuse vertical bands of lower values. I suspect these bands to be a temperature artifact, as it was indeed warmer in the afternoon. Other than these broad vertical bands, I do not see any grouping of colors in a particular direction or any obvious pattern to the image. This is what I expected to see if there is no correlation between two point sources of random waveforms and the direction in which the points lie. I plan on making several more images in the days to come and then do some experiments on the effect of temperature on the zener diodes.

The Effect of Temperature

I squeezed a LM35DZ temperature sensor onto the zener "receiver" board and now I read the board's temperature in degrees centigrade on the Arduino's analog INPUT pin A0. The sensor outputs 10.0 mV per Cº and the Arduino converts  each millivolt to  0.2048 decimal, so Arduino decimal =  Cº * 2.048. l  found good linear correlation of the average zener peak rates to the board temperature. Zener #1 average counts per millisecond = Cº * 3.586 + 241 and Zener #2 average counts per millisecond = Cº * 4.639 + 492. The zeners are not very well matched so I'm not surprised that the average difference squared to the temperature correlation is not linear. By calculating a long term average of the difference squared data, I can compensate for drifting temperature and those broad vertical bands on the images become much less pronounced.

6/11/2017

6/12/2016

6/16/2017

6/17/2017

Conclusion

I have been collecting Lociscope images for a week now and I have not seen any indication that the orientation of the two point sources of random signals, effect the amount of agreement between the waveforms. Although the images contain multiple colors, corresponding to different amounts of agreement in the short term rates of the signals, the pictures appear to be randomly homogenous in nature and do not contain areas of hot spots or cold spots. The images from successive days are consistently random and each image appears to be unique when compared to the others. I must conclude that there are no directional components when comparing short term rates of these two random signals. These results are consistent with the current understanding of how the universe works. This thread is finished for now, unless I think of a new way to approach this subject. DB