Life in optical

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by the excellent Christina Scott to take part in her weekly radio show ‘Science Matters’. The main item of news that was going to be covered was the official signing of the agreement between the South African government and the International Astronomical Union to host the IAU’s Office for Astronomy Development and I was there as a foreign researcher, having just landed in the country.

Having just arrived, I wanted to brush up on the status of various projects that are funding my position in case the journalist asked me about them. I had long phone conversations with Kim de Boer, manager of the the SKA Human Capacity Development programme and Prof. Justin Jonas, Associate Director for Science and Engineering in the SKA South Africa Project Office.

As it turns out I wasn’t asked about SKA during the radio show: the main news was the astronomy development office. But since I got this great update, I thought I’d share a bit about the status of the SKA and MeerKAT projects in this country, because what is happening here is really cool.

First thing: there is way more to the South African SKA project than just the bid to host it.

There is a wealth of investment in people and when you invest in people, you don’t add up assets, you multiply them. And with MeerKAT well under way, cutting edge science and technology are already happening.

So what is happening with the telescopes?

© SKA South Africa

First, there was KAT-7, the Karoo Array Telescope, a 7-dish array that was proposed as a prototype to the SKA. Quickly, this was complemented by MeerKAT, aka more of KAT, which would consist of 80 such dishes.

Well guess what, KAT-7 is being commissioned as I write this. 7 dishes are built, 4 are operating as an interferometer already. All of it on budget, on specs – and ahead of schedule.

There is also C-BASS, installed and operating. Members of the scientific collaboration from South Africa, the U.S. and the U.K look forward to the full-sky temperature and polarization map at 5GHz that will help extract CMB signal from other experiments and observe the synchrotron radiation from relativistic electrons in the galaxy.

What about MeerKAT?

MeerKAT prototype dish at HartRAO in 2007 (Wikipedia)

MeerKat has undergone a ‘concept design review‘, during which international teams and experts come to evaluate the idea. This has all gone swimmingly with positive comments and useful input.

Now, the project is going through the ‘design review process‘, which basically turns the science goals into technical requirements, which then get translated into concrete choices of appropriate technologies and if all goes well, the selected technology should deliver the science.

While the design is being finalised, there are some things that can already be installed, and the team are not wasting any time. The telescopes will need solid foundations in the ground and excellent data connections to transfer the observations to the computers that are going to process them. Those are in an advanced planning stage.

Exciting times! The teams involved are working very hard on this, and on everything at once. Sometimes I wish I could be a fly seeing it all happen…

The Human Capacity Programme of the SKA project is well worth its own blog post and being one of its postdocs, I look forward to meeting SKA scientists and students at the next SKA Postgraduate Bursary conference where everyone will get together.

It’s all about seeing our movement in space. The rotation is obvious – but then the Perseids add a wonderful sense of movement in one direction, and that’s exactly what it is: the Earth cruising through a dusty part of interplanetary space. Like driving through snowfall. The atmosphere is our windscreen but it’s not veery thick! Good thing the shooting stars themselves are no bigger than a grain of sand… :)

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo. Timelapse video of the Perseid Meteor Shower and the galactic core of the Milky Way as seen from Joshua Tree National Park. These were taken between August 12 and August 15, 2010. For more photos and words: Under the Milky Way. Gear: 5D Mk II, EF 16-35mm L. Settings: f/2.8, 6400 ISO, 20 second exposures. Music is Samskeyti by Sigur Ros

Cape Town Lion’s Head Moonrise from carolune on Vimeo.

I love this incredible visualization of a simulation of two galaxies colliding, and the comparaison with fantastic images of galaxy mergers taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

If anything, it really shows that our simulations seem to be a really good imitation of nature!

Sit back, and enjoy the dynamics of the cosmos :)

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It was a collective revelation. The day we had to realise all of our egos fit into 3 pixels…

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read more about the story of the Pale Blue Dot picture

And here is a talk in which Brian Cox tells us why the perspective the Pale Blue Dot gave us 20 years ago still matters today. Enjoy.