PRESS RELEASE: Public release of the iDaVIE Virtual Reality software by the IDIA Vislab

Cape Town, South Africa – October 1, 2024  The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and the Department of Astronomy at the University of Cape Town (UCT) are proud to announce the first public release of the innovative iDaVIE software by the IDIA Visualisation Lab (IDIA Vislab). This milestone marks a significant advancement in astronomy data visualisation and analysis, … Read More

NSTF-South32 Awards – winners!!!

IDIA Wins at the 2023/2024 NSTF-South32 Awards! We are happy to announce that IDIA has won the NSTF-South32 Special Annual Theme Award for 4th Industrial Revolution in South Africa! The hybrid gala events of the 26th NSTF-South32 Awards took place simultaneously in Johannesburg, Cape Town and online during the evening of Thursday, 11 July 2024. This prestigeous awards ceremony, which is the … Read More

MEDIA RELEASE: Meet the 49ers – 49 new galaxies found by MeerKAT and IDIA in a few hours

The 49ers – the 49 new gas-rich galaxies detected by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Each detection is shown as coloured contours, with redder colours indicating more distant gas from us, and bluer colours as closer gas. The background image comes from the optical PanSTARRS survey. Glowacki et al. 2024 The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa has … Read More

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

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