A previous president of the Cornell Astronomical Society was able to purchase a Coronado 90mm telescope for the organization, and I've been eager to try it out. When I found the time in the Fall 2023 semester, I decided to set it up. I pointed it toward the Sun, and was disappointed in the blurry red circle I saw. When I got back to university, I gave it another try, this time reading the manual first. The Sun seemed like a great starting point for astrophotography, because a relatively large amount of detail should be retreivable from any image taken from a telescope equipped with a Hα filter. The few pictures I took through the telescope can be found here.
I found a big 22-element antenna, never opened, in one of the rooms of the Fuertes Observatory. From it, I'd like to do some astronomy-themed radio operations, like meteor bounce, ISS contacts, or maybe even radio astronomy. I've figured out how to mount it on the anti-deck, and am currently working on setting up a connection to a software-defined radio to allow for its actual use. Unfortunately, it's dangerous to get to the anti-deck while the roof is icy, and I have no cable long enough to connect it to an accessible location, so it'll take a bit of time to get it to a point where members can freely make use of the system.
I have a partially complete railway designer that allows users to select parts of existing tracks and design their own rail service. This was a really enjoyable project to get started with, as it involved the use of maps and I had a bunch of small previous experiences with them. I first learned about OpenStreetMap's ability to provide railway information, and quickly built in functionality to fetch its data. I then continued to implementing selection of tracks. Getting tracks to split in the correct location was the trickiest part, as it involved navigational trigonometry. After reading a century-old book from the university library, I implemented the functionality safely, and then ran out of free time to work on the project. Theoretically, all that's left to do is allow the user to place stations, and then it'd be something usable! Though I'd like to also add features that allow for more practical use, such as map diagram generation, timetables, and other service planning features. It certainly could be a novelty in its current state, however, with just a bit more polishing.
I've heard that the 3-meter steerable radio dish mounted atop Cornell University's Rhodes Hall has been abandoned in place, with its cables cut out from the control room. However, it's an impressive-looking antenna, and I think opportunities in radio astronomy and similar fields are being missed if the dish is left there without functionality. I hope to convince some member of the university staff that it would be a good idea to invest the time and energy into recabling the antenna, and allowing for its use by students affiliated with the Amateur Radio Club or the Astronomical Society. For now they've said no, but we'll see what happens in a few years.
I built a custom website to manage scheduling in my high school's Broadcasting Club. The website is complete with a login and account management system, event management and registration, and even a portal for public viewers to access livestreamed content. The site is currently offline due to a port forwarding issue on the school's end. It was a fun experience, both in getting to work on a site that will be used in a real environment, and in getting to work through the technical challenges that come with it. The front-end of the site is written in pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The back-end is a simple Express.js API. I'll share a link here if it's ever online again!