The 9th Annual BRICS Astronomy Working Group Workshop (BAWG2023)

The Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy is a partnership of three South African universities, the University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape and University of Pretoria.

The overarching goal of IDIA is to build within the South African university research community the capacity and expertise in data intensive research to enable global leadership on MeerKAT large survey science projects and large projects on other SKA pathfinder telescopes.

Image: SARAO

The World’s Largest International Astronomy Meeting will be held in Africa and Open to the Public for the first time.

Registrations Now Open for the Historic International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly 2024 Promoting Open, Impactful, and Sustainable Science The National Organising Committee of the 32nd International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly (GA) is excited to announce that registrations are now officially open for the IAU GA 2024. This pivotal event marks a groundbreaking moment as the triennial IAU GA will, … Read More

Astronomers reveal cosmic ribbon around rare galaxy

The galaxy NGC 4632 surrounded by a ring of cold hydrogen gas.  Using the ASKAP telescope, scientists discovered that this galaxy contains a (potential) polar ring of gas that orbits the galaxy at ~90 degrees relative to its body.  The separation of the gas from the main body was made possible through the use of VR analysis enabled by the … Read More

New Release of CARTA V4.0 

The CARTA development team is happy to announce that CARTA v4.0-stable is now released! Over the past year, the development team has worked on implementing new features to improve CARTA support in more use cases. In addition to new feature development, we fixed bugs from v3.0-stable and maintained the codebase.Please visit the CARTA homepage to obtain CARTA v4.0-stable. The user … Read More

Senior Systems Administrator position

IDIA is seeking an experienced systems administrator to join a team that works on supporting OpenStack cloud systems for use by IDIA researchers. Experience working with big data projects in areas such as Astronomy, High Energy Physics, Omics or Earth Observation Science will be an asset. The systems administrator will work closely with the IDIA systems and support teams and will be … Read More

NSTF-SOUTH32 AWARDS 2022/2023 FINALIST

IDIA has been selected as a finalist of the 2022/2023 NSTF-South32 Awards in the catagory Data for Research Award. On Thursday 13 July 2023, all finalists will be honoured and the winners of the 2022/2023 NSTF-South32 Awards will be announced at the specially arranged prestigious gala dinners. The NSTF Awards Gala Event will take place as a hybrid event broadcast … Read More

NEW RELEASE OF CARTA V4-BETA

A new beta version of the Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA), version 4.0-beta, has been released, and is available from the  IDIA CARTA beta server at https://carta-beta.idia.ac.za. Download instructions for other users can be found on the CARTA homepage.  Highlights of this release include: Interactive position-velocity (PV) preview Saving and restoring a workspace (i.e. the current state of CARTA) Image … Read More

CARTA 3.0 Released

The CARTA development team is excited to announce that CARTA v3.0 is now released! The development team has tried hard to elevate CARTA to a higher level over the last 14 months by adding important new features via three beta releases. In addition to the feature development, we also spent a significant amount of time refactoring the codebase so that … Read More

African scientists and technology could drive future black hole discoveries

By Roger Deane and Iniyan Natarajan Astronomers have revealed the first image of the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, an international team made up of over 300 scientists on five continents – including Africa. Black holes were predicted by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity over a … Read More

Diamonds on the soles of their feet – SEADS Talk by Prof. Jaqueline Goldin

We are delighted to welcome Prof. Jaqueline Golden who will tell us about her award-winning Citizen Science project “Diamonds on the soles of their feet”. The talk will take place on 25 May 2022 at 13:00 in seminar room 1.35 the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of the Western Cape. It will also be streamed online on zoom. … Read More

Independently organised hackathon running this week in Namibia

Dr. Lameck Amugongo is a DARA Big Data alum who has been part of ur hackathons before. This week, he takes the resources compiled on this OAD page and runs with it at the Namibia University of Science and Technology with a new generation of student-hackers keen to develop their data science skills. A rich programme with researchers and scientists … Read More