Skip to content

insert

1. The Competitors (Who has done this?)

These projects map directly to parts of your distributed array idea.

A. Project PANOPTES (For Transits/Black Holes)

  • The Goal: Discover exoplanets via transit method (similar to your black hole reverberation mapping goal—both require monitoring brightness over time).

  • The Hardware: They do not use telescopes. They use two Canon DSLRs with standard 85mm f/1.4 lenses inside a weather-proof box.

  • Why it matters to you: They proved you don't need a "telescope" to do photometry. A fast camera lens (f/1.4) collects more light than a slow telescope (f/10), making it perfect for your Black Hole/Kilonova wide-field scans.

  • Source: The PANOPTES Project: Discovering Exoplanets with Low-Cost Digital Cameras (arXiv:1406.6119).

B. Global Meteor Network (For SSA/Orbital Mechanics)

  • The Goal: Track meteors to calculate their orbits and origin.

  • The Hardware: They use Sony IMX291 security camera sensors (~$30 USD) connected to a Raspberry Pi.

  • Why it matters to you: This is your SSA (Space Situational Awareness) solution. These cheap sensors are incredibly sensitive. If they can track a pebble burning up in the atmosphere, they can easily track a Starlink satellite or spent rocket body. They use "drift scanning" (no motors), which reduces the cost to ~$150 per station.

  • Source: Global Meteor Network (Denis Vida et al.)

C. CRAYFIS (For Extreme Distributed Sensing)

  • The Goal: Detect Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays.

  • The Hardware: Smartphones lying face down with the camera covered.

  • Why it matters to you: This proves the "massive N" concept. A single phone camera is tiny, but 100,000 phones form a detector the size of a city. You can use this "old phone" model for your array's notification system or for bright-event triangulation.

  • Source: CRAYFIS: Cosmic RAys Found In Smartphones (arXiv:1410.2895).

1. Other Distributed "Low-End" Networks

Beyond the ones we discussed (Panoptes for planets, GMN for meteors), here are the other major players using cheap hardware for serious physics.

A. SatNOGS (Satellite Networked Open Ground Stations)

  • The Goal: Track and decode telemetry from thousands of satellites (CubeSats, NOAA weather sats, ISS) that professional networks ignore.

  • The Hardware: A $30 RTL-SDR (software-defined radio) dongle + a homemade antenna made of coat hangers or measuring tape + a Raspberry Pi.1

  • Why it’s cool: It is the largest ground station network in the world. When a university launches a student satellite, they often rely on SatNOGS to tell them "is it alive?" because they can't afford a professional ground station.

  • Your "In": You can build a receiving station for under $100 and automatically upload data to their global database.

B. CREDO (Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory)

  • The Goal: Detect "Super-Preshowers"—massive cosmic ray cascades that span the size of a continent, potentially revealing Dark Matter interactions.2

  • The Hardware: Your Smartphone.

  • Relation to CRAYFIS: CREDO is the modern, active successor to the ideas pioneered by CRAYFIS. It runs as a background app, waking up when your phone is charging and dark to count particle hits.3

C. Radio SkyPipe / Radio Jove

  • The Goal: Monitor solar storms and Jupiter's magnetic storms.

  • The Hardware: A simple wire dipole antenna and a sound-card interface.

  • Why it’s cool: While optical telescopes need clear skies, these radio networks run 24/7 through clouds and rain. They create a "seismograph" of the sun's magnetic activity.

2. The Story of CRAYFIS (and why it matters)

CRAYFIS stood for Cosmic RAys Found In Smartphones.4

  • The Physics: When a high-energy particle (like a muon from a cosmic ray shower) hits a silicon camera sensor, it doesn't create a "picture" of an object. Instead, it deposits a tiny electric charge directly into a pixel, creating a bright white dot (a "hot pixel") on a black background.

  • The Innovation: Before CRAYFIS (c. 2014), scientists thought you needed massive water tanks or lead plates to detect these. CRAYFIS proved that while a single phone camera is tiny, a million phones spread over a city creates a virtual detector surface area larger than the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

  • The Status: The original CRAYFIS project is largely inactive/dormant, having served its purpose as a proof-of-concept. The baton has been passed to CREDO and DECO, which are active apps you can download today to do the exact same science.