Early images of the sky achieved with ASKAP commissioning

New images of the sky show that CSIRO's ASKAP is functioning as an aperture-synthesis telescope after just a few months of commissioning.

"We've never had a telescope like this before," said CSIRO's Dr David McConnell, who leads the ASKAP Commissioning and Early Science team, ACES, "We can see that the novel aspects of its design really do work, and that it will outperform a conventional telescope."

One of the images, of a field containing a number of distant galaxies, covers 10 square degrees on the sky — 50 times larger than the full Moon — and was made from nine overlapping beams captured simultaneously, with a dynamic range of 50,000:1.

Added by Flornes Yuen on 2014-06-11