[time-nuts] synchronization for telescopes

[Chris Albertson]

One more comment.   It seems to me time-raging events is hard because you
need many very good clocks that tracks absolute time.

If you redefine the problem to be "determine the time difference between to
events that occurred a couple nights ago it might be much easier.  This
does not need to be done in real  time

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 8:25 AM, Chris Albertson <albertson.chris at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Maybe there is some simpler way to synchronize the telescopes.   Do they
> even need to know the absolute time?  I think only relative time maters.
>
> For that all they need is some kind of a signal that all the telescope can
> "see".   Could they use an FM or TV broadcast station?  They could sample
> and record the signal at a very high sample rate (maybe 4X the career
> frequency) and record their data at the same time.  each telescope would
> need to know its distance to the broadcast antenna.
>
> The idea is to make the hardware cheaper and simpler and put all the
> "work" on the post processing software developers.
>
> For this purpose, measuring the time difference of photons detected at
> different locations, I don't think the broadcast career needs to be
> exceptionally stable.  In post all you do to slide the recorded signal
> until a best match is found.  So we do need a modulated carrier.  We also
> have LOTS of data to use to compute the time alignment because you do it
> later, we'd have billions of samples so it should be immune to noise
>
>
>


-- 

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California