Background: The SALT dedication on 10 November 2005 will be followed by a week long international symposium entitled "The Science Case for Extremely Large Telescopes". This symposium, which is sponsored by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), will be the highest profile astronomical conference ever held on the African continent and will attract the top users of large telescopes from all over the world. These events present a unique opportunity to introduce Southern African students to the type of science that is done on large telescopes and to the people who do it.
Taking advantage of this situation a student workshop will be run at AIMS in Muizenberg from 7 to 11 November with participants attending the SALT dedication at Sutherland on November 10. The workshop is jointly organized by the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP) and the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS); a secondary objective is to bring these two groups, who have many common interests, closer together. We note that both AIMS and NASSP have students from elsewhere in Africa as well as South Africa and, as potential future users of SALT and other astronomical facilities in Southern Africa, they comprise a particularly appropriate group to be present for the SALT dedication.
Lecturers: Five international experts will each present a series of four lecture/demonstrations, on broad topics of interest to users of large telescopes, including astronomical theory and instrumentation:
- Gibor Basri (University of California and the Keck Telescopes, USA)
Extra-solar planets and brown dwarfs - Jay Gallagher (University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA)
Galaxies and Galactic Structure - Brian Schmidt (Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatory, Australia)
Stellar Evolution and Supernovae - Jerry Sellwood (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA)
Cosmology and Dark Matter - Andreas Quirrenbach (University of Leiden, Netherlands)
Adaptive Optics
Programme: here (MS Word document).
Lecture notes: here.
Students: Those attending will comprise NASSP students and AIMS students with a physics background. Other physics research students interested in attending should write a brief email motivation to Patricia Whitelock (paw@saao.ac.za) stating their full names, relevant qualifications, the course for which they are registered, the email address of their supervisor and one paragraph on why they want to attend the workshop.
We also anticipate being able to allow about 10 of the students to attend the international symposium the following week. They will be expected to help with small tasks, such as distributing question and answer papers during the symposium.
Organizing Committee:
- Peter Dunsby (UCT)
- Fritz Hahne (AIMS/SU)
- Renee Kraan-Korteweg (UCT)
- Clifford Nxomani (SAAO)
- Neil Turok (AIMS/Cambridge)
- Patricia Whitelock (SAAO) - Chair
Sponsors: