THE ASTRONOMY SCENE62 Portable star trackers
Easy ways to shoot the sky.
By Jerry Lodriguss
66 Test report
Celestron’s NexStar Evolution 9.25.
By Rod Mollise
72 Astronomer’s workbench
Brent’s beautiful homebuilt scope.
By Jerry Oltion
76 Gallery
Latest images from our readers.
79 Marketplace
80 Indextoadvertisers
82 Focal Point
The bright nova that got away.
By Stephen P. Cook
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ON THE COVERThe world’s largest radio telescope will
soon begin operation in Australia and
southern Africa. See page 28.
P.72 An amazing wooden homebuilt scopeIN THE REMOTE DESERT and scrub regions of Western Australia and
southern Africa, an incredible adventure is taking shape. Not a safari or
an outback tour, but a scientific adventure — the creation of a $1 billion,
international, multi-decadal astronomy facility on a scale the world has
never seen before. It’s the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which, when
completed, will comprise thousands of antennae picking up faint radio
whispers from the farthest reaches of the universe.
There was initial disappointment in both Australia and Africa when it
was announced some years back that the SKA would be shared between
the two continents, rather than having it located on one or the other. But
I think it’s fair to say that those feelings have dissipated. The SKA is such
a huge endeavour that hosting half of it is more than enough for anyone.
Just as Hubble, and other telescopes before it, changed our view of
the cosmos forever, so too will the SKA revolutionise our understanding
of space and time. The flood of data that will be analysed by the world’s
best supercomputers, will not only help to answer age-long questions
about the evolution of the universe — it promises also to throw up new
questions and puzzles that we haven’t even thought of yet.SKA will be a
game-changer
Jonathan Nally, Editor
[email protected]by Jonathan Nally SPECTRUM
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Australian Sky & Telescope.EDITORIAL
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