Day 1: bRing Commissioning at Sutherland

First day of bRing commissioning, we (Remko, Jeb, Patrick – Leiden Team and Steve and myself – SAAO Team) met at 10am at SAAO to leave for Sutherland. After a lovely lunch and 4 hour drive we got to Sutherland and started some planning and orientation.

So far, we got to the site location for bRing and have checked that it’s concrete pier, power source and fibre connectivity is completed and ready for commissioning.

With a meeting this evening, we have outlined some idea’s on what is needed to be completed on bRing and identified tasks to different members on what can be done in the week, before we take it to site location at the end of the plateau.

Tomorrow we find bRing at the workshop and unpack it to start the first phase of our commissioning.

CAMERA
bRing observing Platform completed

 

 

 

 

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Blaine Lomberg

Blaine Lomberg studied Physics from 2005-2008 at the University of the Western Cape. In 2009, he completed an Honours Degree specializing in Nuclear Physics. In 2010, Blaine joined the Accelerator and Engineering Group at iThemba Labs, where he worked on ion source physics focusing on a diagnostic device for ion beam quality measurements. His Master’s thesis was titled, “Studies of an emittance measurement device for beam quality optimisation of ion sources”. From September 2012 -2015, Blaine joined oPAC (optimization of the performance of any Particle Accelerator - FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) scheme) an EU Consortium as a Marie Curie Fellow and was jointly based at the Cockcroft Institute for Accelerator Science in Daresbury and the University of Liverpool, UK. During his fellowship, Blaine developed advance R&D technology for novel optical instrumentation for particle accelerator diagnostic applications. In July 2016, Blaine joined the SAAO as a PDP (Professional Development Program) fellow, with his research aimed on developing novel instrumentation for observational astronomy; specially focussing on studying exoplanets such as ringed system’s similar to Saturn. His interest includes adaptive optics and optimising imaging systems for overcoming the limitations of conventional telescopes used today. Within the NRF-SAAO collaboration, Blaine is a PhD student with the University of Cape Town working with Dr. Steve Crawford and co-supervision by Prof. Patricia Whitelock. In addition, Blaine enjoys blogging, being active in student outreach, disseminating science and his research to the public and local communities.

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