Description
Organiser: Deborah Malone; co organiser: Meryem Dag, Emily Ronson
This session is to facilitate the communication between Astronomy and Instrumentation Early Career Researchers as a fun activity which encourages groups of participants to design a new instrument together from scratch. First, the group is given a brief introduction (~5 minutes) on how instruments are built, including the kinds of criteria that are important to define. Then, the groups (3-4 people) can be given a random observation target, or decide for themselves, along with keywords to help in designing the instrument, and work together for ~20 mins to determine what kind of instrument they would need to observe it with, the size of the telescope, how long they need to observe it for, and what kind of adaptive optics they would need to use. Is it an exoplanet? Does it need high-contrast imaging? Is it a high red shift galaxy? Does it need to be observed with an extremely large telescope? Perhaps itโs a fast-moving comet thatโs very close to the sun!
At the end, each group has two minutes to present their concept instrument for their chosen observation target, and a panel of peers will give out prizes for best pitch, along with a few other fun awards.
Astronomers and Instrumentation Scientists must work together to develop the next generation of Telescopes, and it is extremely important to understand the needs of each group to successfully design and build the instruments that will form part of the telescopes.
