Professor Richard McDermid

The good thing is that by building Mavis, we actually secure a certain amount of time to use Mavis.

is something that's called guaranteed time observations.

The MAVIS consortium will have access to the best part of 200 nights, the majority of which would be led by Australian astronomers.

And we can certainly do a lot with that time.

That's extremely valuable and useful time scientifically.

It's not the same as having ongoing access that we can compete for with new ideas.

But in terms of the MAVIS project, it means that there's a just return, let's say, on the investment that we've made.

Of course, the bigger picture here is not just to build one instrument to get a certain number of nights.

Building Mavis made us part of a community.

It let us actually lead a project here for completely state of the art technology.

That collaboration and exchange and development is the real benefit from doing this kind of work.

Yes, it's not like 200 nights of access to everything.

It's entirely possible.

The adaptive optics technology I mentioned, it has a well-developed application in medical imaging of the eye in particular.

So when you want to get a sharp image of a retina in a living person, we can just chop it open and have a look.

You actually have to look into the eye, but through the existing material, the lens and so on of the eye.

And so that causes a kind of a distortion of the image of the retina, which is the thing you're trying to investigate.

And adaptive optics can be used to account for the effects of the organic matter between your microscope and the thing that you're trying to image.