Nick Pingel (ANU) came by Flatiron and impressed us all with discussions of ASKAP, which is one of the pathfinders to the SKA. The most impressive thing I learned is that the feeds for the telescope array are themselves dipole arrays, so you can synthesize multiple beams at each telescope, and then synthesize an aperture for each beam. That's a great capability for the array, but of course is also an engineering challenge. He said scary things about what the calibration looks like. It really made me wish I had got closer to radio astronomy in my life!
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