Andrew Reeves, WCA graduate student spends a week at Dunlap Institute

I just spent the past week at the Dunlap Institute Summer School for Astronomical Instrumentation. Students came from all over the world - five continents in total! It was quite a lot of fun to learn and get hands on lab experience with components of telescope systems we use remotely for our research here at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics. In particular, I learned a lot about how scientists and engineers go about designing various detectors for telescopes (it's really complicated), as well as how they work. Topics covered range from x-ray, to optical/near-infrared, to radio - both telescopes and detectors, as well as adaptive optics and interferometry. Modern astronomy increasingly makes use of all of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just what our eyes can see, so I was especially interested to learn more about non-optical astronomy. I think some of the knowledge and insight gained from the summer school will improve my research going forward, as well as help me collaborate with other astronomers working with non-optical wavelengths.