[janoskiss (Steve H)]

I don't believe any other Iceinspacers attended. I'll attempt to give the gist of Dr Staveley-Smith's talk... here it goes:

We have a good idea of the distribution of galaxies in our neighbourhood and a long way beyond thanks to visual observations. Exceptions are galaxies hidden behind the bright glow of the disk of the Milky Way.

Here is where radio astronomy, and the 21cm wavelength that corresponds to a hyperfine transition in atomic hydrogen, comes in. We can map/image the neutral hydrogen in the universe using large radio telescopes that are tuned to listen for the faint hiss of cold hydrogen atoms.

... And they found lots of galaxies and lots more structure in and around galaxies already seen with visual astronomy... (and there was graphs, pictures & 3D plots I can't show you)

Then we heard about the very long term project that is the SKA and got to look at a radio pollution map of the world which makes a convincing case for Western Australia. Other contenders are South America and Africa. (Also the US, but it's ridiculous based on the level of radio pollution.) We'll have to wait over a year to find out the location of the SKA. I personally hope it will be WA. It is by far the best site.