Professor Jocelyn Bell-Burnell (left) visited South Africa during July 2007 to deliver a number of presentations around the country. In the picture she is seen at the new MeerKAT prototype dish with Sarah Buchner (middle) and Sharmila Goedhart (right), staff members at the Hartebeestoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HartRAO).

Professor Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 whilst working on her PhD at Cambridge University. She visited South Africa as a guest of the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) and of the HartRAO Visitors Programme.

At HartRAO, she presented a talk on “Women in Astronomy”; and also presented a public talk at the planetarium at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her plenary presentation during the SAIP annual conference was on “Pulsars and Extreme Physics”. She spoke about the discovery of pulsars at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and at the new Astronomy Centre at the South African SKA Project Office in Rosebank, Johannesburg.