I work on the engineering side, rather than the project management side. The two EHT telescopes that I work on are in Arizona, although I build some of the hardware that's being taken to the South Pole Telescope. It's getting improved to be a part of the EHT. One of the Arizona telescopes is a prototpye ALMA antenna that we just moved here from New Mexico last year, and got working a month ago.

Observations are typically done in March/April. This gives good weather at the many sites involved. The typical run is a week, and they try to get several 10-minute recordings during that time period. The data is recorded at 1 Gbyte/sec onto banks of hard drives, then shipped by FedEx to MIT for correlation. (I don't know if a FedEx truck makes it to the South Pole every day.)

The frequency used for most observations in in the 1.3mm band. The baselines are intercontinental (Arizona, Hawaii, Chile, hopefully Antarctica), up to 5000 miles. The goal is to actually get fringes between all stations, although that's not always possible due to weather and/or equipment acting up.

If you have any actual questions about how it's done. I might be able to shed some light on what this thing is. It involves masers and 4K fridges and some rather high IF frequencies.

I work in radio astronomy. From what I can gather, things in other star systems are too far away to even be able to communicate, much less transport between them.

Those huge arrays of radio telescopes being built in Chile and South Africa are able to detect things on the order of a planet in size. That doesn't mean that they can communicate with the planet, just see that it exists.

I may have spoiled your statistics by watching this video more than once.

I live in the Arizona desert, where we have violent summer thunderstorms, and lots of overhead wires for power and telephone. We sometimes have the wind knock over long stretches of lines. It's worse on the mountaintops where the telescope I work on are located. Each site has a generator to keep the equipment running.

I am a staff engineer at a university, so I receive most all the spam that is sent to the university's professors. I get many invitations to conferences. I assume that most, if not all, of them are bogus, since I'm not a researcher and most of them are for fields that I don't work in.

When I have looked into one or two of them out of curiosity, I went down a rabbit hole of internet weirdness (SEO, lack of citations, etc.)

This is a very impressive feat. I am old enough to have done stuff like this regularly in my early career, as PCs didn't exist at the time. I figured that no one bothered to build systems themselves and port OSes to them these days.

There's a guy who took it a step further back and built a custom CPU out of TTL. He also made up his own architecture and instruction set and compiler and OS and application programs...

http://www.homebrewcpu.com/

The whole point of this exercise is that there *isn't* a tutorial.

Learn by doing!

A laptop is its own UPS and surge protector.

The first paragraph of your comment makes a bit of sense. The second one is out there in la-la land. Your "SJW type" sounds like a straw man. Do you honestly think that people who receive rape and death threats, then publicize these threats, are doing it for the "attention, money, or political power"?

I believe he's referring to displays that cost less than the Pi... from thrift stores. Spending $200 on a screen for a $25 computer is a bit silly. (I know that some folks use the Pi as a $25 computer for the $200 display they already have, but...)

This is achieved by having a really big aperture. In this case, the array is spread out over 15 km, so the aperture is effectively that size. Try putting a 15 km array of telescopes in space! The information processing is necessary to combine the signals, as a 15 km single-dish antenna would be a bit tricky to set up.

One number that's woefully missing from the news stories is the wavelength (frequency) at which the observation was made. NRAO has made two sets of receivers, at 3 mm and 1.3 mm wavelengths, for this array. Other countries have made different receivers, but I don't know if any of those are being used right now. Ned more information!

This image is the result of a 25 year project to build a big interferometric array of millimeter-wave radio telescopes in Chile. The ALMA array is a mind-bogglingly complex system of 60+ telescopes, a correlator to combine all the signals, some bleeding-edge technology to maintain phase coherence of gigahertz signals traveling over many kilometers of optical fibers, and a bunch of other feats of engineering. I am awed by the results, and amazed that it was possible to get the whole thing to work.

I'm privileged to get to work on a prototype antenna for this project, which was just installed on Kitt Peak and commissioned today.

I met one of the guys who did this work at JPL, Jim Blinn, 30 years ago. He was quite a knowledgeable astronomy guy in addition to being a first-rate computer animator.