Daily Image
30-08-2007
Boolardy
| Submitter: | Tom Oosterloo |
| Description: | For some, the landscape of Western Australia is boring and featureless. Others are fascinated by the almost mathematical patterns of dry river beds, hills and sand formations, that have a repetition and variation that is almost musical. The light and the emptiness "lifts the roof of your skull" , as the Australian writer David Malouf describes it. Whatever your judgement of the beauty of the land, the emptiness means that it is an excellent place to do radio astronomy. At a place called Boolardy, an empty track of land a few hundred kilometers inland from Shark Bay, is the site is where ASKAP (the Australian SKA Pathfinder) will be built (Shark Bay, by the way, is one of the first places visited almost 400 years ago by the Dutch while exploring the coast of New Holland as Western Australia was called then). ASKAP is a widefield radio telescope that will operate from 700-1800 MHz and that will be able to cover, using Focal-Plane Arrays, the sky more 10 times faster than existing radio telescopes at these wavelengths. It will also host the MIRA Widefield Array (MWA), a telescope that will operate at similar wavelengths as LOFAR. The picture shows the typical landscape of this part of Western Australia. It was taken only a few km NW of Boolardy, while flying from Perth to Karratha, a small town about a 1000 km north of Boolardy. This Perth-Karratha airtraffic passes straight over Boolardy and is one of the main sources of RFI for the site (but they were not observing yet so I don't feel guilty...) |
| Copyright: | Tom Oosterloo |
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