New Zealand summer school brings together radio astronomers

Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and the Institute for Radio Astronomy and Space Research (IRASR) successfully hosted a New Zealand Radio Astronomy Summer School this past February. The event was held at AUT’s Warkworth Radio Astronomical Observatory and its City Campus and featured talks by preeminent New Zealand and Australian radio astronomers.

A mixture of lectures and practical sessions, ranging from the fundamentals of signals (the Fourier transform, autocorrelation, convolution, etc.) and the astrophysical radio sky (masers, quasars, pulsars, etc.) to the configuration and operation of observatory instrumentation kept participants busy over the three-day event.

Radio astronomy in New Zealand has links stretching back to the pioneering work of Elizabeth Alexander on solar radio emission in the 1940s and John Bolton and Gordon Stanley’s mobile sea (cliff) interferometer, which they used in New Zealand to discover the associations between radio sources and optical objects (1948).

In 2008, AUT installed New Zealand’s first professional radio telescope (12-m) in Warkworth, 60km north of Auckland, and established the Warkworth Radio Astronomical Observatory. A few years later, Telecom New Zealand provided AUT with a decommissioned 30m satellite antenna, which was later converted to a radio telescope by specialists at AUT.

By this time, New Zealand was already involved in the SKA. Bearing in mind that the development and operation of the SKA would require specialists in astronomy and computer science, the Astronomy major (currently Astronomy and Space Science major) was established by the School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences to prepare specialists with strong computing, astronomical, and radio astronomical background.

Warkworth Radio Astronomical Observatory.

Credit: Sergei Gulyaev

by Sergei Gulyaev (Auckland University of Technology