SETI@home uses the largest radio telescope in the world (the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico) to continuously scan the sky for radio signals. To learn more about how we search for signals, read Ron Hipschman's article on how SETI@home works.

How to read a skymap

How much of the sky have we scanned? Here are some current maps: Example of a telescope scan on one day (Aug 13, 2000) First five months of the project Current sky coverage since the beginning of SETI@home The number of times each area has been scanned

Unfortunately, the Arecibo telescope is not operational all the time. Sometimes the telescope is not recording data for SETI@home, and at other times it is recording bad data. A calendar showing what days had what sort of data is available for viewing.

After the data is recorded onto tapes at Arecibo, they are shipped back to the SETI@home lab in Berkeley, California. The data are then broken up into workunits, which are sent out to the client screensaver program for candidate signal detection. So far, SETI@home has generated 227,960,467 workunits from the data received from Arecibo. SETI@home has split 1,400 tapes, meaning that the average tape yields 162,477 workunits. This is somewhat lower than the optimal yield of roughly 200,000 workunits per tape because of radio frequency interference, gaps in recording, problems with the recording equipment, etc.

To view our current collection progress, see our graph showing recent workunit accumulation.