On 5 November 2022, the Wajarri Yamaji gifted us with a traditional name for our observatory. The new dual name is the first outcome from the new Indigenous Land Use Agreement finalised in early November. The traditional name means ‘sharing sky and stars’ in the Wajarri language.

For more information, please go here.

The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located in the Murchison region of Western Australia. It consists of 36 dish antennas working together and was designed to image large areas of the sky using advanced receivers known as Phased Array Feeds (PAFs).

Radio telescopes make images of the sky at radio wavelengths, revealing information that our eyes cannot see. They can detect many interesting objects in our universe, from clouds of cold gas that may eventually collapse to form new stars, to the high-energy jets emerging from super-massive black holes at the centres of other galaxies far from the Milky Way.

Most radio telescope antennas can only look in one direction, but ASKAP's phased array feed receivers allow this telescope to look in several directions at the same time, like an insect's compound eye. This means we can image very large areas, making ASKAP an excellent instrument for large-scale surveys and detecting when things change. Phased array feeds generate much more data than traditional receivers, meaning that ASKAP needs a lot of computing power. Some of this computing power is located alongside the telescope at the observatory, but we also need a high-speed data link back to the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth. This is where astronomers turn the raw data from the telescope into images of the sky.

This live display shows what the telescope is doing right now. The Left-most circle shows progress through the current observation. The sky map in the centre shows where the telescopes are pointing (each antenna is represented as a + symbol, and the filled blue circles show the location of several radio galaxies outside the Milky Way. If you watch for some time you can see how these sources appear to move across the sky due to the rotation of the Earth. The Sun and Moon are shown as larger orange and grey circles. The blue line represents the plane of the Milky Way, our own galaxy.

The right-hand display shows the status of the antennas themselves, each of which has thousands of individual components that are constantly monitored. The whole telescope can be controlled remotely via the internet.

For more information, please go here.