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SKA South Africa Bursary Conference

Today marked the end of  SKA South Africa‘s Bursary Conference in Stellenbosch. Now in its ninth edition, the meeting brings together astronomy and engineering students and fellows from across South Africa presenting their work in front of their supervisors as well as some international guests. As it is often the case, this meeting of minds also involved a fair amount of alcohol and hugging!:-) See you in 2015 then!

High Performance Computing in the African Bush

I’ve been spending this past week at Kruger National Park’s Skukuza Rest Camp catching up with work while attending the yearly gathering organized by South Africa’s Center for High Performance Computing. I’ve eavesdropped on most sessions to get a feeling for the kind of problems facing contemporary high performance computing but also for the numerical scientific work being done in the country. I gave a talk about Big Data in Multi-Wavelength Astrophysics and managed to go on a couple (one disappointing, one very nice) of early morning game drives. Student participation was very much encouraged at the conference and about 10 student teams battled with a computing cluster building project to be completed during the conference. The winners were announced last night, and are going to be trained by Dell in their Austin headquarters to participate into the international finals in Frankfurt next year . A UWC team had won the past two editions but unfortunately this year’s aptly-named (uhm) “bi-winning” team didn’t make it this time around. Team SA also went on to win the international finals on the past two occasions, so no pressure on the Wits team;-). The conference will now be drawing to a close with a Q&A Sessions with the HPC Industry Vendors, and it’ll then be goodbye and see you all in Port Elizabeth on Nov 30 – Dec 4th 2015. In other news, a local water sports practitioner tragically died, apparently while taking a bath late at night in the nearby Golf Course’s Ninth Hole lake the other day. One can’t be too careful with crocs, I guess:/)

CHPC Conference Banner
CHPC Conference Banner

The Digital Universe

I am spending the week at “The Universe of the Digital Sky Surveys” conference in Naples, catching up on the latest news from sky surveys from both ground and space and enjoying excellent coffee, red ginseng, mozzarella, pizza and seafood on the side.

The conference is also a celebration of  Massimo Capaccioli‘s 70th birthday. Massimo is between other things the PI of ESO/INAF’s VST telescope, built by INAF on behalf of ESO, which has been working for about 3 years now and I’ve actually been using for a survey project of mine. The conference will therefore be showcasing some of the first results from VST surveys.

The meeting is hosted by the Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte, which as I now recall I first visited for a graduate school in astronomical technology back in 2000. Weather’s looking good this morning and everybody’s suitably delighted to be up the hill overlooking the bay of Naples.

This morning we started with a couple of excellent review talks about ground-based and space-based extragalactic optical surveys by Tom Shanks and Yannick Mellier respectively, but surveys of the nearby and distant Universe alike will be presented. We’ll have a few talks and posters presenting VOICE results, on wednesday Oxford/UWC’s Matt Jarvis will be presenting VIDEO and I’ll be closing things down talking about HELP and Data Fusion as the last speaker (oh joy!;-) on friday afternoon.

It all looks like it’s going to be a great conference: live streaming and twitter feed are available.

The Greatest Show on Earth

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an international project involving 10+ countries to build the ultimate radio telescope. Its name stems from the fact that the total collecting area, divided into thousands of dishes to be deployed in Southern Africa and Western Australia, will eventually be roughly equivalent to a filled square of 1 kilometre in side.

South Africa and Australia are currently busy completing MeerKAT and ASKAP, known as SKA precursors, which are both intended to test some of the technologies required for the SKA and to address some of the science questions to be tackled by the SKA. The SKA project itself will then be realized in two phases, with Phase 1 and Phase 2 construction to be completed by 2020 and 2030 respectively, and work is currently ongoing in completing the Phase 1 instrument design.

This week, more than 250 scientists, including yours truly, have thus gathered for the SKA 2014 Science Conference in Giardini Naxos, close to Taormina in Sicily, Italy, whose aim is to discuss the several science areas which the SKA is more likely to contribute to. With 100+ science talks on the schedule it sure looks like it’s going to be a busy and fun week, which the twitter-inclined can follow through the project tweets  and/or the live tweets from the conference.

Of Galaxy Clusters & Cosmic Dust

A couple of scientific papers I was (loosely) involved in have recently made the news, both exploiting European Space Agency‘s Herschel Space Observatory.

In the first one, my former postdoctoral supervisor, Dave Clements at Imperial College London, combined data from the Herschel & Planck space observatories to detect what we now believe are some of the most distant galaxy clusters found to date. Imperial’s full press release dwells some more on the discovery and its implications.

Herschel/Planck Galaxy Clusters (ESA/NASA/Herschel/Planck & Dave Clements)
Herschel/Planck Galaxy Clusters (ESA/NASA/Herschel/Planck & Dave Clements)

In the second paper, my fellow Italian Luca Cortese used Herschel to perform the most accurate census to date of cosmic dust in nearby galaxies. For the more graphically inclined, my old chum Bruno Merin with the Herschel Science Centre in Madrid has also produced a very nice image slider to navigate the optical and infrared appearance of this large sample of nearby galaxies. ESA’s press release will fill you in with the details.

Herschel Reference Survey (ESA/Herschel/HRS/HeViCS/SDSS & Luca Cortese)
Herschel Reference Survey (ESA/Herschel/HRS/HeViCS/SDSS & Luca Cortese)

Well done to both, then. For the record, the Herschel Space Observatory was launched on May 14th 2009 and carried out scientific operations until the liquid helium employed to cool its instrumentation ran out on April 29th 2013. However, its 37,000 scientific observations, illustrated in the animation below, will be actively studied for years to come. Here’s to many a press release and shiny graphics!

The Way We Used To Meet

Scientists used to complain about being involved in too many meetings.

These days, they more often complain about being summoned to too many telecons, videocons and immersive remote-attendance meetings of all sorts. And some of the software systems developed to make all of this somewhat less painful are not too bad, actually.

And so I find myself attending, along with my boss sitting atop a Hawaiian volcano where he is observing at a telescope, the first meeting of the HELP consortium taking place in Brighton, Sussex, UK.

This got me thinking about how we as humans crave in-person contact, and how mundane and disconnected we feel when communicating through a computer screen. That is why I think it’s important for companies to read resources like this page in order to get acquainted with what’s needed to satisfy customers and coworkers alike.

Here’s a sneak peek at our humble objectives.

HELP Objectives
HELP Objectives

VOICEs

A sick-ish day at home went by between a lively telecon of our VOICE collaboration and sorting out a few related actions.

The VOICE project, jointly led by Giovanni Covone and myself, employs ESO‘s VST telescope to carry out a deep and wide multi-epoch optical imaging survey of the sky CDFS and ES1 fields. Observations haven’t progressed as fast as we thought when we first set out with the project in late 2011, but the large amount of existing multi-wavelength data in these fields have allowed us to make the most of the relatively little VST data obtained to date.

While the first papers are now in the process of being drafted, today we mostly discussed possible improvements to be made to the data processing pipeline and plans for the completion of the survey.

vst-voice-overlay-120228-cdfs-labelsvst-voice-overlay-120228-es1-labels

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