Friday, February 18th at 11.00am @ the JAC

ABSTRACT: SCUBA-2 is an ambitious project to develop a ~10,000 pixel camera for the JCMT. The pixel count is a huge leap forward over any current or planned instrument for the submillimetre waveband. The project is complex as the multi-national team are developing a new detector technology and readout scheme in parallel with designing the instrument. Due to be delivered to JCMT in mid-2006 SCUBA-2 will image up to 1000 times faster than SCUBA and make large-scale surveys (100's to 1000's of sq degrees) of the submillimetre sky feasible for the first time. This informal talk will give an update on the exciting technical developments particularly the new detector arrays and the (large) instrument being built to accommodate them.