Last month, I briefly visited the town of Sutherland with two other colleagues. It is a town located about 350km from Cape Town. Its altitude, relative isolation and arid conditions make it a perfect spot for optical observations and hence is the pride of South African Astronomy. The town itself is a semi-rural settlement that faces several […]
Category Archives: Blog
Astronomy for Development is inherently a global idea, cutting across all geographical and most human barriers. It has been steadily gaining momentum over the past few years. With the establishment of Regional Offices across the globe, there are more stakeholders than ever before. It is now critical to stick to the bottom-up approach to include a diverse range […]
If you would like to set up an Astronomy Club, the information here serves as a starting guide. The first step is to understand what kind of club you want to start. There are aspects or characteristics, such as the target audience, that will help you define your club. For instance, it could be a school […]
Your excellencies, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen I stand here humbly, having travelled from the Southern tip of the great continent of Africa. Such long flights are always emotional for me as I pass over country after country without being able to see from the sky where one nation ends and another begins. Each country with […]
Five years ago, I made the life-changing decision to resign from my comfortable academic position at the University of Sheffield, a well‐respected university in the north of England, and move to the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. Then, as now, my research focused on “star clusters”, which are the observational foundation […]