Dutch-RSA Radio Continuum Science Workshop in Cape Town

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In the last week of March, a meeting was organized in Cape Town to bring together the Dutch and South African communities working on radio continuum and calibration issues connected with that. The meeting was organized as part of the activities supported by the NWO-NRF agreement (with PIs of the radio continuum group Huub Rottgering for the Dutch side and Kurt van der Heyden for South Africa, and PIs of the group on calibration techniques Jan Geralt Bij de Vaate and Oleg Smirnov). The goal was to help the two communities to expand their collaborations and exchanges of students and visitors.

The meeting was held at the University of Cape Town and the logistics was in the hands of Kurt van der Heyden and Nicky Walker. They did a great job in taking care of all the needs of about 50 participants. The workshop has been a great success, with a full three-day program which covered a very broad range of topics, from calibration and imaging techniques, to galaxy clusters and active galactic nuclei, deep fields, magnetism and VLBI. This gave to the two communities, but in particular to the many young postDocs and PhD students, a very good overview of the many ongoing projects, including those involving new telescopes like KAT7 and LOFAR.

The next meeting is planned to be next year in the Netherlands, but hopefully some of the new collaborations will not wait until then to deliver results and to expand further the exchange of students and visitors.