SARAO E-Learning Portal
The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) as a national research facility remains committed to world class research and fostering a vibrant research community of radio astronomers on the African continent.
The E-Learning platform offers online teaching and training material to universities in South Africa and across the continent, allowing for more academic institutions to participate in radio astronomy research. Pre-recorded lectures and presentation slides, hands-on tutorials on a range of topics that includes using MeerKAT public data, as well as problem sets and solutions are available.
The materials and courses are generated and presented by SARAO and collaborating scientists and engineers, aiming to complement university training courses in order to garner interest among students and young professionals to pursue degrees in radio astronomy.
The SARAO E-Learning platform is updated frequently as MeerKAT and radio astronomy research with this instrument evolves, in our efforts to continue supporting early-stage researchers (including postdoctoral research fellows and doctoral students) to develop into project leaders on MeerKAT science proposals, and increase their participation in future large-scale radio astronomy research programmes.
Educators and scientists who have any questions, or are interested in using any of our materials, want to contribute to our effort, or just have some useful suggestions, comments or corrections can contact us at elearning@ska.ac.za
Fundamentals of Radio Interferometry
Fundamentals of Radio Interferometry
Description: The focus of the course is an introduction of the astronomical and technological principles essential to radio astronomy. As such the course structure follows and compliments the Fundamentals of Radio Interferometry course offered to Masters students in the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP).
Target audience: Astronomy postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates with backgrounds in astronomy, applied sciences, or engineering.
Online Structure: Course
Access: Open access to entire course and materials
Format: The course lessons are presented as a series of YouTube videos. Each video is approximately 60 to 90 minutes in duration and contains multiple lectures. Individual lecture information is provided per lesson. Lesson specific supplementary materials are also provided. These include slides, presentations and/or practical code from the NASSP Fundamentals of Radio Interferometry course. The per lesson supplementary material can be accessed by selecting the Materials tab next to the Lesson tab.
Workshops
African Radio Interferometry Winter School
Description: The African Radio Interferometry Winter School (ARIWS) is an annual workshop introducing students and young scientists to MeerKAT science and data processing. It includes standard “introduction to interferometry” lectures, as well as hands-on exercises to build practical experience in handling large MeerKAT data files and processing MeerKAT data using MeerKAT software on cloud compute facilities.
Target audience: Astronomy postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates with backgrounds in astronomy, applied sciences, or engineering
Online Structure: Workshop
Access: Open access to most courses and materials. Limited access to certain practical sessions and materials featuring MeerKAT data sets.
Format:The course lessons are presented as a series of YouTube videos. Each video is approximately 60 to 90 minutes in duration and contains multiple lectures. Individual lecture information is provided per lesson. Lesson specific supplementary materials are also provided.
MeerKAT pulsar timing workshop
Description: This two-day MeerKAT pulsar timing workshop, introduces students to pulsar timing science, including the required softwares and data analysis techniques needed to understand and conduct pulsar timing. It starts out with a set of foundational lectures that provide general introductions to programming and statistical data analysis with accompanying exercises. Thereafter the principles of pulsar timing are introduced, along with data analysis and reduction techniques to obtain optimal pulsar timing residuals using MeerKAT data provided to the students. The workshop concludes with an overview into the physics that can be extracted from pulsar timing analysis, and in particular from the timing of relativistic binary pulsar systems.
All exercises are run within VirtualBox the appliance for which can be downloaded and run as described in the workshop material.
Target audience: Astronomy postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates with backgrounds in astronomy, applied sciences, or engineering.
Online Structure: Workshop
Access: Open access to most courses and materials.
Format: The course lessons are presented as a series of live Zoom recorded videos of typically 60 minutes each. Each lesson covers a particular workshop topic, and contains information about the accompanying exercises where relevant. The videos and a brief summary of the lecture content are accessed by clicking on a lecture title, which will load the Lesson tab. The slides and relevant exercise materials are accessed by selecting the Materials tab next to the Lesson tab.
MeerKAT Grand Tour Data Science Workshop
Description: The MeerKAT Grand Tour Data Science workshop was hosted at Rhodes University from 15 to 21 January 2023.
Funded by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (SARAO) Human Capital Development Programme, the workshop was held in collaboration with the Breakthrough Listen initiative, the MeerTime collaboration, the TRAPUM collaboration, the Transient Array Radio Telescope consortium and the Centre for Radio Astronomy Techniques and Technologies (RATT) in the Department of Physics and Electronics at Rhodes University.
The topics that were covered offered students the opportunity to acquire the relevant skills in instrumentation and radio astronomy techniques, for example data analysis and visualisation, calibration and imaging using MeerKAT and the Rhodes Transient Array Radio Telescope, pulsar detection and timing on the MeerKAT array and exposure to the digital signal processing techniques employed by modern telescope electronics and the global Breakthrough Listen Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) network.
The workshop featured lectures, invited talks and other contributions from:
Professor Justin Jonas from Rhodes University, SARAO and SKAO
Distinguished Professor Oleg Smirnov from Rhodes University and SARAO
Dr. Fernando Camilo, SARAO Chief Scientist
Dr. Stanley Kuja from Rhodes University
Mr. Keegan Trehaeven from Rhodes University
Mr. David MacMahon from University of California Berkeley
Dr. Daniel Czech from University of California Berkeley
Ms. Ruby van Rooyen from SARAO
Dr. Marisa Geyer from SARAO and University of Cape Town
Dr. Landman Bester from SARAO and Rhodes University
Mr. Benjamin Hugo from SARAO and Rhodes University
Dr. Tim Molteno from the University of Otago
Dr. Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan from the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn
Target audience: Astronomy postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates with backgrounds in astronomy, applied sciences or engineering.
Online Structure: Workshop / Seminar
Access: A limited number of talks/lectures from the workshop can be accessed having good audio quality.
Format: Videos vary in length with most presenters giving an overview of the topic presented.
e-Seminars
e-Seminars
Description: The e-seminars are a series of public talks focusing on the South African and broader African contribution to cutting-edge radio astronomy research, as well as scientific, technical and human capital advancements in the field that will further increase the radio astronomy footprint on the African continent.
Target audience: All
Online Structure: Public Talk
Access: Open access
Format: A single e-seminar is presented as 45 – 50 minute YouTube video.
MeerKAT Student Community
MeerKAT Student Community
Description: Given the large MeerKAT community with students of all levels and interests, the MeerKAT student community presents a collection of lectures and training videos addressing all aspects of radio astronomy and the MeerKAT telescope.
Target audience: All
Online Structure: Presentations and Training
Access: Open access
Format: A range of YouTube videos ranging in runtime.
Introduction to radio astronomy and tools
GitHub for Astronomers
Description: GitHub is a cloud-based platform to host Git repositories and is well suited to scientific programming and extensively used by the science community. MeerKAT scientific software is located in GitHub repositories for easy access and use. Scientists may need to interact with these Git repositories to get access to some MeerKAT user tools, MeerKAT data processing software as well as MeerKAT example usage notebooks.
Target audience: Astronomers, scientists and students who need to interact or use scientific software published on the GitHub web interface.
Online Structure: Presentations
Access: Open access
Format: This is a short course presented in three focused presentations to get the scientific user up and running very quickly. The presentations are complemented with usage documentation that acts as quick user reference guides. The reference manuals are provided as supplementary materials to the course.
Radio Astronomy for Beginners
Description: Pre-graduate and high school level projects and interactive Python notebooks that can be used to introduce learners to the concepts of radio astronomy without the need to have a radio telescope.
Target audience: High school learners and up
Online Structure: Presentations and Training
Access: Open access
Format: This is a short reference course with hands-on tutorials available through the Google COLAB interface to help learners understand the basic concepts of radio astronomy through practical experience.
Quick Links
Contact
E-Learning Department
Email: elearning@ska.ac.za
Disclaimer for E-learning
All courses offered on SARAO’s E-learning platform are meant for informational purposes only. None of the courses have been accredited by a qualification authority in South Africa or internationally. SARAO has not applied for any accreditation that would be recognised by a South African accrediting authority, nor would it qualify for such accreditation due to its non-traditional nature.
Last Updated on May 17, 2024
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