Life in optical

Yabi on the beach

A month ago, I joined the AIMS Cosmology research group. Bruce Basset’s (our unanimously admired professor :) ) cosmology group itself isn’t new but what is new is that we now are at AIMS.

Yesterday we had a bunch of visitors and we had a great group day.

A friendly, openminded, inspiring atmosphere is such an asset in a research group that I though I should mention this specifically.

The group has a weekly day-long meeting which involves a journal club, perhaps a short talk and a ‘hack’ session of a few hours where we learn to dabble in new skills under the guidance of our resident expert and hack along on mini projects. Everyone’s involved: students, researchers, visitors, the big boss. The weekly day also involves walks on the beach, coffee and lunch together, which are great moments to discuss projects, ideas and issues. We are all settling in the format and this has become a nice feature of our week.

Working together in unassigned offices

Last week there was a cool conference in Stellenbosch, for which a number of scientists came from abroad. South Africa being a faraway destination for most, many decided to stay on for a week or two. We invited Hillary Sanctuary to come and give the first ‘CosmoAIMS’ seminar of the year and invited whoever was still around to come along.

What happened is that suddenly the group size doubled. We went from about ten to twenty people. Most stayed all day using available desk space and collaborating on projects, participating in the journal club, attending the seminar, coming along for lunch, and even for dinner. All in all it was a great day. Who knows how many of the ideas discussed will lead to papers or jobs ultimately? Even if it’s a small fraction, so many ideas were discussed that it definitely beats not having such a day.

Lively discussions at coffee

One thing that made this so easy was that we don’t really have assigned desks as group members so no table looks like it belongs to anyone. So when visitors come along, they are free to feel as much at home as anyone else.

The fact that we have one day a week that we spend together is a very special thing in itself. We don’t lock ourselves away in our offices working on out own separate projects and that makes a big difference when it comes to feeling part of a group.

I feel that we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of social cohesion in a research group and that it probably is neglected more often than we think.

Thanks to all who were there yesterday, we had a great day!

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

Being a total timelapse junkie I was peacefully imaging the sunset when I read chatter about noctilucent clouds all over twitter. A trending topic in the stream of UK people I follow. I opened my camera, put together my timelapse, and sure as twitter, there they were :) Yay!

I don’t think I have ever seen a noctilucent cloud timelapse before.

Clouds, sunset and noctilucent clouds from carolune on Vimeo.

First we see the clouds. The the sunset colours them orange, then they disappear.
Then they start glowing again, way into the night. Those are Noctilucent clouds.
For more info, check here:
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/nlc1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctilucent_cloud

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 :)