We changed the declination of the interferometer antennae to point at +41, and got several good transits of Cygnus A (3C405), shown below.
Our next target is Hercules A (3C348), at a declination of +5, currently transiting in the middle of the night for us, so no Sun problems.
Using CCERA’s “insanely small array” radio telescope, we have successfully completed a 4-day “study” of the extragalactic radio source Virgo A. Show below are both the complex-correlator outputs, and the brightness derivation. Virgo A, also known as M87, is a massive galaxy some 54 million light-years from earth. It plays host to a super-massive black hole at the center, which produces a super-luminal (apparently-faster-than-light) gas “jet” of ejected material.
Its radio flux at 611MHz (our observing frequency) is approximately 500 Jansky, or 5×10^-24 Watts/M^2/Hz of bandwidth. Since our antenna are roughly 1 M^2 in area, That means that we’re intercepting a few pico-watts of power from this source!