In New Zealand, I was lucky enough to have as a teacher the extraordinarily knowledgeable and patient senior scientist Tim Natusch. Tim brought me for observing at the Auckland observatory, where we many times looked from the dome at the long, white cloud lending the Maori name to the island (Aoteroa), and to the radio observatory in Warkworth.
Tim was at the time heavily involved in building up the radio telescope infrastructure, and taught me many aspects of radio astronomy and antennas. Ultimately, I remotely oriented the radio dish and recorded data, performed a small radio scan of the sky, and did some manual Fourier transforms of the recorded data. All great fun!
Tim always signed his emails with “Cheers,”, followed on the next line by a manually indented spaces and his name. I’ve adopted this myself and keep thinking of all the things I learned in my time at the Institute for Radio Astronomy and Space Research at AUT.
Cheers,
Johannes
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