In January 2018, students from Botswana and Namibia attended unit 1 training in Windhoek. The course was delivered by Prof Garret Cotter along with two of his Ph.D. students, Mr Paul Morris and Mr Sam Spencer. The local host was Dr Michael Backes of the University of Namibia. The participants of the two weeks training programme were graduates and postgraduate students in physics, electronics engineering, and computer science from BIUST, Namibia University of Science and Technology, University of Botswana and UNAM. The course comprised of lectures in the morning and classwork in the afternoon.

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Outside the classroom the course was convivial. In the evenings, informal discussions about topics in astrophysics were held over dinner. A day trip to the H.E.S.S. gamma-ray observatory led us into the middle weekend, when the Namibia students showed the visitors from Botswana the sights of Windhoek. On the final night we watched “The Dish”, a movie about the participation of the Parkes radio telescope on the Apollo 11 landing. For students keen to learn about radio astronomy it was an unexpected treat!