Outreach Events

The UK ALMA Regional Centre Node routinely participates in public outreach events in the Greater Manchester area.  Among other activities, the UK ARC Node has participated in the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2012, Manchester Science Spectacular, National Science and Engineering Week, and Jodrell Bank Live.  A complete list is available on our public outreach events list.

If you are interested in a visit from the UK ALMA Regional Centre Node, please contact us.

Software

The UK ALMA Regional Centre Node has developed a software GUI illustrating how interferometry works known as the Pynterferometer. The software allows users to rearrange, add and substract antennas in a simulated interferometeric telescope and see how this effects the image an interferometer will create of the sky. The user can also use a number of built-in sky images or even take a picutre of themselves to 'interferometer-ize'.

The Pynterferometer is written in the Python scripting language and works on Mac OSX, Windows (older versions) and Linux.

This software is available from http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/pynterferometer/ .

A paper based on this software, useful for teachers for getting the basics of interferometry is available from the European Journal of Physics.

Lab Activities

The UK ALMA Regional Centre Node has also designed a series of lab experiments that can be used to learn about ALMA, interferometry, and millimetre astronomy.  This includes instructions on how to download, view, and analyse data from ALMA. These activities are described in a series of lab scripts that can be used in secondary school or university coursework. See the lab scripts page for detailed descriptions of each experiment.

Colouring Sheets

For younger children, we have created a series of colouring sheets based on photos of the telescope and astronomical images created by the telescope. Both jpg and pdf versions of these sheets are available from our colouring sheets page.