Posts tagged as:

telescope

Understanding our gas-guzzling home: the Milky Way

“There’s a lot we still don’t know about our Milky Way galaxy,” says Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths of the Australia Telescope National Facility. “It’s the old forest and the trees problem – we have a hard time seeing its structure from the inside.”
Since 2004, Naomi has headed the Galactic All Sky Survey, or GASS, the most [...]

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No moving parts – a new kind of radio telescope

Far outback in Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory located on Boolardy Station, 315 km north-east of Geraldton, 32 tiles each carrying 16 dipole antennas have begun to collect scientific data on the Sun. At the same time they are providing engineering information to be used to extend the facility to a much bigger array of 512 tiles-the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).

The MWA is designed to study radio sources at low frequencies, a poorly known part of the radio spectrum between 80 and 300 megahertz. It will be one of the world’s first telescopes without any moving parts. In fact, the array is ’steered’ electronically, which means the direction the telescope points depends entirely on how the signals from its stationary antennas are combined and processed.

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Australia’s biggest digital camera – 268 mega pixels

On a mountaintop in northern NSW sits a new telescope equipped with Australia’s largest digital camera. The ANU’s SkyMapper facility has been established at Siding Spring Observatory to conduct the most comprehensive optical survey yet of the southern sky.

Fully automated, the telescope is measuring the shape, brightness and spectral type of over a billion stars and galaxies, down to one million times fainter than the eye can see.

The heart of the system is a $2.5 million, 268- mega pixel digital camera that covers an area 40 times greater than the full Moon every minute. The huge data set (100 megabytes per second) will be shared with the astronomical community and wider public.

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The sky’s no limit with ASKAP

The world’s most advanced “sky survey” radio telescope is taking shape in a remote part of Western Australia inland from Geraldton.

The 36-dish Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, or ASKAP, features new CSIRO-developed “focal plane array” technology that gives it a huge 30º field of view. “So instead of concentrating on one small patch, we can cover the whole sky in a fairly short space of time,” says Dr Simon Johnston, ASKAP project scientist.

A large dynamic range-the difference between the strongest and weakest signals picked up- is another advantage. “We’re aiming to get a dynamic range 10 to 100 times better than CSIRO’s current flagship telescope, the Compact Array,” says Simon.

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Australia and New Zealand—the home of next-generation radio astronomy?

Imagine a telescope so revolutionary that in one week it will gather more information than that contained in all the words spoken in human history.

The Square Kilometre Array, or SKA, will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope and will dramatically increase mankind’s understanding of the universe.

The infrastructure enabling this expansion in knowledge may be placed in Australia and New Zealand, whose proposal to host the SKA has been shortlisted by the international science community. A final decision is expected in 2012.

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