Most students on their days off like to go to the movies, take in a basketball game, watch television or go out to the bars. But seniors Eric Davis and Adam Whitney had other ideas.

Davis, senior in electrical engineering, and Whitney, senior in computer science, came up with a rather unusual idea one weekend while looking for something to do — why not build a telescope?

Davis and Whitney decided to work on the difficult task of building a telescope in their apartment.

“It all started when we saw a magazine article about amateur SETI (Search of ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). SETI is an application of radio astronomy,” Davis said. “Amateur radio astronomy is looking at the radio spectrum of celestial bodies.”

Because of the team’s college-student budget, Davis said he and Whitney started searching for used equipment. They found a used 6-foot satellite dish, which was converted to form the antenna of their telescope.

“When most people see a radio telescope, they think of a huge dish, but ours is actually smaller,” Whitney said. “A smaller dish is usually better for SETI work, because it has a wider field of view … “

The project allows the two to compare and distinguish the differences between two types of astronomy — radio and optical.

Davis said optical astronomy is where people can see the sky and sources of light.

Radio astronomy, he said, allows people to pick up the radio waves of unseen celestial bodies.

Building a radio telescope is not an easy task. Whitney and Davis said it takes time, dedication and hard work.

“We’ve been working on it for about a month, but we’ve still got a long way to go. We have a lot of testing of the different components to do, and we also have to learn how to interpret the radio signals,” Whitney said.

Even after the telescope is completed, Whitney and Davis will be constantly “tweaking” it to increase its performance.

Whitney and Davis said they learned about computer software and how to build and test circuit boards. They also had to convince their landlord to put a big dish on the deck. “After all, it’s not something you see every day,” Whitney laughed.

The telescope consists of a long pole with a big satellite dish constructed on top of it. The pole is in the back of the building, hidden from view, with the dish peeking above the roof.

A low-noise amplifier is set above the dish. The amplifier is hooked up to an RF cable that connects it to the receiver. The receiver is then, hooked up to the computer.

The computer then does a “Fourier” transform, which visually displays a graph on the monitor. There also is a speaker hooked up to the computer that enables a person to hear the signal.

“The earth acts as our rotator because we can adjust the altitude of our dish, and because of the way the earth turns, we can let the celestial body go over the dish and it will graph that data,” he said.

The telescope project proved a good hands-on experiment for the men’s educational training.

For more information visit their Web site at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~apw/seti.html.