OBSERVATORY
A DESKTOP RECEIVER SYSTEM TO DETECT, LOCATE, AND VISUALIZE CELEST- AND TERRESTRIAL RADIO SIGNALS
When Karl Guthe Jansky, a young engineer at Bell Laboratories, discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Wayin August of 1931 the field of radio astronomy was born.
His rotating antenna "Jansky's merry-go-round" had picked up three types of static: Nearby thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms and a "strange hiss", which he eventually traced back to the Sagittarius constellation, a powerful source of electromagnetic waves at the heart of our galaxy.
observatory is a web radio player application for macOS that renders a completely unique, never before seen “celestial drawing” while users navigate between 14k web radio stations. by using the stations ID as a seed returning to a stations will always bring up that same constellation of the firmament again. values for arrangement, frequency and specific locations of stars, nebulae, celestial objects and spiral galaxies are generated through perlin noise. image dithering is achieved through the floyd–steinberg algorithm.
