Annual General Meeting - And The Square Kilometer Array Project
with Dr James Di Francesco
Please come to the meeting so we have a quorum to do the society's business. It will take about 30 mins starting at 8pm. Outside of that, regular star party activities will take place including sidewalk astronomers, dome and planetarium tours, and the other activities supported by our volunteers..
Welcome
Approval of the Agenda (motion)
Approval of the Minutes of the 2022 October 22nd Annual General Meeting
Report of the Chair
Report of the Treasurer
Report of the Education Coordinator
Recognition of retiring board members 2022-3
Election of the Board of Directors
Any other Business (including Member Q&A)
AGM Adjournment
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The Square Kilometer Array Project
James DiFrancesco
Summary
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is an ambitious international project to build the world’s largest telescopes for observing the universe at radio frequencies. Though one observatory, It will consist of two separate facilities, the first in western Australia for lower frequencies (50-350 MHz) and the second in South Africa for higher frequencies (350 – 15,300 MHz). Canada is presently in the process of joining the SKA Observatory partnership, having secured a commitment to do so just earlier this year. In this short talk, I will highlight what the SKA will become and the science breakthroughs it is expected to make. Also, I will highlight specifically the Canadian contributions to the project, including the powerful correlator for the South Africa-based facility and the transformation of our Canadian Astronomy Data Centre to manage even a fraction of its vast data output. With the first science observations expected as soon as 2027, SKA is coming up fast – get ready for more science discovery in the near future!
About Dr Di Francesco
Dr. James Di Francesco obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 based on research into the circumstellar environments of young stellar objects under the supervision of Prof. Neal Evans II. He spent three years (1997-1999) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA and three years (1999-2000 at the University of California, Berkeley, expanding his research. In 2002, James returned to Canada to join the Millimetre Astronomy Group at the National Research Council’s Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre (HAA) in Victoria, BC, continuing his research into the internal structure of nearby star-forming molecular clouds and developing the Canadian contributions to the international Atacama Large Millimetre Array observatory. In 2018, he became the Director, Optical Astronomy at HAA and Director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory.