A South African point of view about the SKA can be found in a fine set of slides of a presentation by Claude Carignan (see his bio at:
http://craq-astro.ca/un_membre_en.php?id=claudecarignan) which was made at the ngCFHT conference in Hawaii in March 2013 :
http://ngcfht.cfht.hawaii.edu/presentations.php
Look for the presentation by Claude Carignan with the title "SKA pathfinders". It is a 31MB .pdf file.
Carignan is a very capable northern hemisphere (Canadian?) astronomer who also used to do a lot of radio astronomy in Australia.
[[ For instance, a lot of the pioneering work on the Neutral Atomic Hydrogen content and the mass distribution within the various Sculptor Group galaxies was done by Carignan. Also, Carignan was important in carrying forward the Galaxy Rotation Curve analyses that helped to characterize the dark matter distribution in the outer regions of disk galaxies. Refer to the search results after googling on the search terms "Carignan + HI + sculptor + group". .]]
No surprises for guessing why Carignan recently moved to South Africa!!
All of a sudden, well known extragalactic astronomers have started to flock to the University of Cape Town.......
(though I might add here that UCT has always
punched well above its weight in astronomy)
[[ One of those things that pro astronomers often have to do, just to get a job, is to be willing to hang out in some of the less developed countries that are nonetheless able to access significant amounts of telescope time (Mexico and Brazil and South Africa spring to mind.) ]]
________________________
Madbadgalaxyman's very opinionated opinion of the day:
" If the SKA project can 'civilize' Namibia,
which not long ago had a decades long civil war, perhaps it will become safe enough for all of us to move there..... Namibia may have the Best skies on planet Earth"
- R.L.