Astro Seminar: High angular resolution instrumentation at Sydney

In this talk we discuss Asgard - a next generation instrument suite at the VLTI - giving an overview of the science cases and suite as a whole. We then detail the opto-mechanical design of the fringe tracker (Heimdallr), Zernike wavefront sensor (Baldr) and telescope simulator (Solarstein), with key learnings from this process. We also present our recent work on photonic lanterns - what they are, why they are useful and how to understand and use them on future instruments, including an exciting synergy for nulling interferometry with the Asgard suite.