Today we were given a nice tour of the labs at ASTRON. They do not only radio instrumentation, but also optical and IR work. We got to see the LOFAR development as well as stuff for the SKA. They were in the middle of assembling “X-shooter” an instrument for the Very Large Telescope in Chile. See below for pictures!
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Monday, 30 July 2007
The Jodcast – an astronomy podcast
I came across this while looking for interesting podcasts. Operated by Jordrell Bank (a well known radio astronomy center in the UK). It’s a monthy podcast in mp3 format that talks about various news in astronomy. The July episode has a guest talking about the Gemini telescopes – a pair of 8.1m telescopes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
ASTRON Summer Student Lectures
There is a small summer student lecture series at ASTRON which aims to expose the summer students the various aspects of radio astronomy. We had 5 lectures and I’ve posted my notes online. They were general overviews about the major topics including: H I (neutral hydrogen), the LOFAR radio telescope, Pulsars, and Masers. They notes contain mostly non-technical summaries of the respective topics. Enjoy!
Friday, 27 July 2007
Grote Reber
Yesterday I had the great opportunity to be present at a ceremony commemorating the first radio astronomer: Grote Reber. After his death in 2002 (just shy of his 91st birthday), his ashes have been sent to the major radio observatories around the world. The Dwingeloo Radio Observatory here at ASTRON is one of those locations.
As part of this ceremony, several of Grote Reber’s friends came and gave presentations on his life, including Dave Jauncey (from the Australia Telescope National Facility) and Ken Kellermann (from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory). Oddly enough, I’d never heard of Grote Reber before being invited to this ceremony, but after hearing the presentations, I learned how much he contributed to the area of astronomy in which I’m working.
After the presentations about Grote Reber, there was a short presentation about LOFAR, which will be operating in the low-frequency range in which Grote did most of his work. At the conclusion of this talk, we all went outside to the radio telescope where the plaque commemorating Grote and his ashes was unveiled.
It was a very nice ceremony and I am glad I was able to attend. If you have the opportunity to read more about Grote Reber, he was quite a scientist. He published around 70 scientific papers. While the number isn’t particularly impressive today, most of his papers were single author, which is impressive. Also, he published papers in ~30 journals, which is also impressive given most scientists today only publish papers in a few journals close to their main field.
EDIT (30 July 2007): A picture of the plaque unveiling is now online.
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
The JIVE Correlator
The correlator is a vital component of a radio interferometer. This piece of equipment (or more recently, software) compares the signals from pairs of telescopes, generating the data which is later used to make an image. The correlation has the added benefit of reducing noise (which is generally uncorrelated between telescopes).
Bob Campell of the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) gave the summer students a tour of the JIVE correlator. Follow the link below to see the pictures and descriptions of what’s in each picture. Some of the descriptions give a bit of information about how a correlator works, but I hope to provide a more complete picture in the next mini-article about my research.
