jovian-noise

jovian-noise is a program that will forecast possible upcoming Jupiter decameter radio storms, which you can hear on a shortwave radio (best between 18MHz and 23MHz), with a suitable receiver and antenna.

This program should be reasonably accurate, but there's always a possibility that the event will fail to materialize for one reason or another - possibly a bug with the program, possibly a bug with Jupiter itself.

This was originally inspired by a QBASIC program at http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelab/projects/jovrad/jovrad.htm, but uses external libraries for many of the calculations and can optionally limit the returned results to when Jupiter will be above the horizon at your location.

To run this program, you will need to obtain the VSOP87 files for planet locations (an archive is located at ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/VI%2F81/, but a github mirror located at https://github.com/ctdk/vsop87 is probably easiest) and place them in a directory somewhere. The environment variable VSOP87 must be set to the path of the directory with the VSOP87 files.

    Usage of ./jovian-noise:
      -duration duration
            Duration (in golang ParseDuration format) from the start time to calculate the forecast (default 720h0m0s)
      -interval int
            Interval in minutes to calculate the forecast (default 30)
      -lat int
            Optional latitute. If given, will limit results to when Jupiter is above the horizon at this location. Requires -lon
      -local
            Optionally use this computer's timzone to display results. Conflicts with -timezone and -offset-hours.
      -lon int
            Optional longitude. If given, will limit results to when Jupiter is above the horizon at this location. Requires -lat
      -non-io-a
            Include forecasts for the non-Io-A radio source.
      -offset-hours float
            Optional offset in hours east of UTC to display results. Offsets to the west should be given with negative numbers (e.g. '-offset-hours -7'). Conflicts with -timezone and -local.
      -output string
            How to format the forecast for output. Currently acceptable options are: text (default), json. (default "text")
      -start-time string
            Start time (in RFC 3339 format) to calculate Jupiter radio storm forecasts (defaults to the start of the current hour)
      -timezone string
            Optional timezone for displaying results. Conflicts with -offset-hours and -local.
      -version
            Print version number and exit.

Credits

Many web pages went into getting this together. The most immediately useful for this program were:

• http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/spacelab/projects/jovrad/jovrad.htm
• http://www.projectpluto.com/grs_form.htm
• https://github.com/akkana/scripts/blob/master/jsjupiter/jupiter.js

More Information about Jupiter amateur radio astronomy

• http://www.radiosky.com/rjcentral.html
• http://www.thrushobservatory.org/radio.htm
• http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/ -- NASA's Radio JOVE Project

License

Copyright 2016-2022, Jeremy Bingham, under the terms of the MIT License.