Professional astronomy has long since moved past the telescopes of Kepler and Galileo. How do the massive astronomical instruments you see in the news work, and how are they designed? Prof. Abigail T. Crites will be taking us step-by-step as she deconstructs the astrophysicists' toolbox!

You may be familiar with some of the fantastic technology and instruments to do astronomy and the pictures we get with them of our cosmos, but how do these telescopes and cameras actually get built? What do experimental astrophysics do all day? I will discuss astronomical instrumentation and what technology we use to measure the sky across the electromagnetic spectrum from UV telescopes to superconducting transition edge sensors. I will describe how these instruments are created and what the careers of astronomy "builders" are like. I will also show some images of the sky taken with different instruments and describe the discoveries they have allowed astronomers to make.

Dr. Abigail T. Crites is an Assistant Professor at U of T's David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics as well at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. In her research, Prof. Crites develops and uses millimetre-wavelength instruments to investigate the first billion years following the Big Bang.

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