22nd July 2014: The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Brazil, has taken a critical step towards joining the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project, with the Executive Board of FAPESP approving the allocation of $40M towards membership in the GMT project (see press release for further details). This is great news for Brazilian astronomers and for the GMT partners, which include ANU and AAL.

5th June 2014: CSIRO and AAL are pleased to announce that funding has been secured to enable the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) to be equipped with a total of 30 Mark II Phased Array Feeds (PAFs), six of which will be installed on the central BETA antennas that are currently fitted with Mark I PAFs.
This has been made possible through an agreement between AAL and CSIRO in which AAL is allocating $6M of NCRIS-2013 funds for ASKAP early operations and CSIRO will provide a matching contribution to construct, install and commission six additional Mark II PAFs.

23rd May 2014: AAL is delighted to announce that ten nights per year on the Keck telescopes will be available to Australian-based astronomers during 2016 and 2017. This time has been made available by the W.M. Keck Observatory to AAL via the Australian National University. The collaboration is made possible through the support of the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

AAL would like to thank the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU who enabled this additional access to the Keck telescopes to be secured via ANU’s existing partnership with WMKO. AAL also thanks the Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology who supported AAL’s engagement with WMKO.

AAL will work with ANU-RSAA, Swinburne-CAS and the AAO to investigate how to maximise the scientific-return from Australian access to the Keck telescopes. It is worth noting that from 2016 the ANU, Swinburne and AAL arrangements will enable Australian astronomers to make use of a total of forty nights per year on the Keck telescopes.