Date:   May 1, 2008 (Thursday)
Time:   11 am EDT (refreshments at 10:50 am)
Place:  Green Bank Auditorium
         (Video: CV Auditorium)

Speaker:  Steve Padin, University of Chicago

Title:  "The South Pole Telescope"

Abstract:
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-m, off-axis Gregorian telescope 
equiped with a ~1k-pixel, 3-color, millimeter-wave bolometer camera. It 
was built primarily for observations of the cosmic microwave background 
radiation and other weak, diffuse emission. The telescope has an 
unblocked aperture, shielded beams and co-moving and fixed ground 
shields to minimize sytematic errors due to scattering. SPT has just 
started a large cluster survey using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. The 
goal is to set constraints on dark energy by measuring the redshift 
evolution of the density of clusters.