SKA telescope gets its ‘1st fringes’

Radio astronomers are thrilled about the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescopes, currently under construction at two sites, one in Australia and one in South Africa. But when two (or more) radio antennas – or stations of antennas as in the case of SKA-Low – are observing together for the first time, radio astronomers call this “first fringes” instead of first light. But on January 25, 2023, the SKA Observatory reported that its prototype telescope at Karoo – called SKAMPI – achieved first light with an image of the southern sky in radio.