An Earth-sized radio observatory just got better: South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope joins forces with the European VLBI Network of telescopes
South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope has successfully conducted very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations with telescopes of the European VLBI Network (EVN)—currently the world’s most sensitive VLBI network. Their synergy sets a new standard for global collaboration and significantly enhances both resolution and sensitivity, opening new avenues for scientific exploration.
All sky, all the time – A new radio sky monitor for transients and technosignatures
Breakthrough Listen, headquartered at the University of Oxford – the most ambitious project to date searching for technosignatures (signs of technology as an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence) – is partnering with ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and the University of Manchester, to deploy a new all-sky monitor at the Westerbork Observatory in the Netherlands. The new experiment takes phased array feeds (PAFs) – essentially wide-field radio cameras – that were previously deployed on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), and installs them on the ground, looking up at the sky directly.
Sweden and the United Kingdom Join the LOFAR ERIC
Sweden and the United Kingdom have joined the LOFAR ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) as a member, following the decision of the Council on 26 March 2025. This significant expansion brings the total membership to eight countries, marking an important milestone in the growth of this pioneering research infrastructure.
ASTRON receives €4.6 million to widen and sharpen LOFAR’s cosmic vision
The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded over €4.6 million to ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, for a major upgrade to the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope. The project, called LOFAR Enhanced Network for Sharp Surveys (LENSS), will significantly increase LOFAR’s observational capabilities, enabling astronomers to view four times more of the sky simultaneously while producing images with unprecedented clarity.
Multi project Gitlab pipelines
© Public Domain
Typically, these pipelines are isolated across software components. Resulting in difficulties executing pipelines in a specific order. This could potentially lead to deploying components without all the requirements being installed.
Luckily, Gitlab offers multi project pipelines through triggers. These triggers allow to chain together the pipelines defined across multiple software components, passing variables and data to its children as needed. Through this facility team Ruby is able to automate the software installation from hardware delivery to fully running station software with the push of a single button.
Overall this setup still allows for fine grained control, by manually deploying individual pipelines when required, while also adhering to the single source of truth principle. Individual software components retain the knowledge about their deployment step and contain secrets such as SSH or API keys. While, overarching pipelines have knowledge about system overview as well as the order of deployment steps.
In this daily image we illustrate these multi-project pipelines. Should
you have any questions how to set this up for your own team or group do not hesitate to contact Corne Lukken on slack or send an email to lukken@astron.nl
CASPER Workshop 2025
Mon 08 Sep 2025 - Fri 12 Sep 2025
The CASPER workshop is a semi-annual workshop where FPGA, GPU, and general heterogeneous system programmers get together to discuss new instruments in radio astronomy, as well as the tools and libraries for developing and manipulating these instruments.