Shortly after the Christmas break, I made the long trip from Edinburgh in the UK to Perth, Western Australia, to work with colleagues at the SKAO Science Operations Centre. I have been working on the SKAO project for almost three years, and joined the team developing the Monitoring, Control and Calibration Subsystem (MCCS) software in …
Observatory Sciences will be attending the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2026 conference, held from 05-10 July 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Please come and see us at Stand #418. For further information click here.
In October 2025, three of OSL’s experienced EPICS engineers delivered a successful bespoke training course at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. Attended primarily by a group of radiation protection engineers, the course gave a three day introduction to EPICS which included a variety of topics from fundamentals such as …
This September 2025 Observatory Sciences was proud to be a gold sponsor of the 20th ICALEPCS (International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems) conference in Chicago. Five members of OSL attended: Alan Greer, Ulrik Pedersen, Emma Arandjelovic, Thomas Ives, and Bryn Roberts. The conference was held at the impressive Palmer House Hotel, with plenary …
The Spring 2025 EPICS Collaboration Meeting took place this April at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). Directors Alan Greer and Andy Foster attended, along with three members of the Observatory Sciences Ltd (OSL) Oxford office: Ulrik Pedersen, Phil Smith, and Bryn Roberts. OSL’s Oxford office is based at RAL and the meeting was attended by …
In March 2025, director Alan Greer together with six OSL engineers travelled to Eindhoven in the Netherlands to participate in the 26th PI (Program Increment) planning event for SKAO. This was an ‘all hands’ face-to-face event, which saw 256 people from teams all over the globe coming together to plan our work for the next …
As the SKA-Low project progresses and more sub-components are integrated, close collaboration with the integration and testing teams is crucial. In September, the MCCS team attended a planning conference in Perth, where they outlined their goals for the next three months. They also had the opportunity to visit the observatory in Wajarri Yamaji Country, Western …
SPIE’s Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference in Yokohama, Japan, brought together astronomers and engineers in June 2024 offering opportunity to share new and exciting technologies and techniques for the future of astronomy. Observatory Sciences’ engineers Alastair Borrowman, Benjamin Carpenter and Elliot Scott attended. Carpenter and Scott both had papers accepted and displayed their work in …
In June 2024, Observatory Sciences engineer Emma Arandjelovic travelled to Pune, India, to participate in the 23rd Program Increment (PI) planning event for the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO). There are currently ten countries involved in this collaboration to build the world’s largest radio telescope (with more in the pipeline!), so remote working technologies such …
OSL has opened a new office on the Harwell Science and Technology Campus near Oxford, one of the world’s premier locations for cutting edge science and research. This is OSL’s third location, complementing our existing offices at St Ives near Cambridge and Dunfermline near Edinburgh. The Harwell Campus is already home to over 6000 scientists …