The SKAO Observatory: the future of radio astronomy

Over the last 30 years and more, the international radioastronomical community has been conceiving, designing, and now building a radio interferometer with an unprecedented collecting area, frequency span, and spatial resolution. The SKA telescope, operated by the SKAO Intergovernmental Organisation, is the result of this community effort. The SKA is not yet producing science-grade data, but a bunch of precursors and pathfinders like MeerKAT, ASKAP, LOFAR, and MWA are. The precursor data are used by the community, together with purposely tailored simulated data, to set up the mindset and the tools to exploit SKA in the future. This paper is not written to provide a compendium of what has been done and is currently planned around SKA. It is rather meant to provide the reader with a simplified access to the SKA world, describing where it comes from, where it is, and where it is expected to go once operational.