Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Monday, May 16, 2011

Chilbolton & Wherwell Local Information Day

On Saturday 14 May 2011 a visitors' day was held at the LOFAR Chilbolton site. This was a requirement of our LOFAR planning application, namely that we host some form of public-information event for the local communities of Wherwell and Chilbolton Village. Three members of the LOFAR-UK team (Derek McKay-Bukowski, Brian Ellison and Malcolm Coe) were at hand to show visitors around the Low-Band and High-Band Arrays and to give them a rare glimpse inside the RF-container.

In all, it was a very successful day, with lots of interesting questions. In total we had over 75 guests at the site. We certainly hoped that all our visitors enjoyed the event. Hopefully, we will be able to hold an open day for the general public sometime in the future as well. And many thanks to Brian and Malcolm for giving up part of their weekend to assist Derek with explaining the LOFAR-UK facility.


Brian Ellison (in the high-vis vest) explains how the LBA aerials work to locals including Graham and Brian Patterson (on his left and right respectively).

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

LOFAR on the Naked Scientist Podcast

I discuss LOFAR and LOFAR-UK with Andrew Pontzen on the special National Astronomy Meeting edition of the Astronomy podcast for the Naked Scientists.

MP3 of just the LOFAR segment.

Link to the whole podcast (including a transcript).

LOFAR on Google Maps

Another fun post from our friends at KAIRA - LOFAR stations now visible on Google Maps.

Not Chilbolton yet though - still just empty fields shown at the moment for our UK station.

How Does LOFAR Work (Parts 10 and 11) from the KAIRA blog

We're getting a bit behind in the series, but here are the next two installments from the KAIRA blog about how LOFAR works:

Part 10 : Multi-beam operations (explaining one of the techniques used in the press release about the first peer reviewed science results from LOFAR).

Part 11 : Ambiguities (about phase errors)