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TV Shoot at HartRAO - 2013-07-04



Science outreach is an important part of the aims of HartRAO, and brings many visitors such as school groups to the observatory. But every year we also get requests for TV shoots for educational programmes, often aimed at young people.

On July 4 HartRAO hosted a TV shoot organised by Trishana Singh of Urbanbrew for YoTv - DigiKnow, based around questions about radio astronomy.

The pictures below capture some of the action.

Jabulani
Left click on image for large version. Credit: Marion West / HartRAO
PhD student Jabulani Maswanganye, who is researching masers found in star-forming regions, volunteered to talk about spectrocopy, the technique he uses to study the masers. He is seen here being filmed on the north ladder of the 26m radio telescope, with the 15m telescope beyond.

Jabulani
Left click on image for large version. Credit: Marion West / HartRAO
Sunelle Otto is an engineer working on the African VLBI Network project. She talked about how we run the radio telescope and about the pulsars that we observe with it. Here she is seen in the telescope control room explaining how the computers control the telescope and carry out the observing programmes.

Jabulani
Left click on image for large version. Credit: Marion West / HartRAO
Accurate position measurement using GPS is one of the spin-off sciences that relies on having radio telescopes to provide absolute positions on the Earth. Here MSc student Cilence Munghemezulu, who has been studying the movements of the African tectonic plate using GPS, is seen next to the GPS base-station antenna, preparing for the shoot.