Yee-haw, I am off to the biggest astronomy conference in the whole wide world!  This year it is in Austin, Texas, which is so far from the Netherlands I have to fly hours and hours to get there.  I’m glad that gives me lots of time to look out the window!

Finally we are in Texas!  When I get to the hotel room I am mesmerized by the view- we are on the 12th story “corner penthouse” room of the hotel looking right down Congress Avenue straight to the Texas Capitol in the distance. (Yvette says it never hurts to ask!) I want to go exploring but that will have to wait, there is work to do and we have to go to the convention center.

First we stop at the press room where journalists file stories to all corners of the globe!  Yvette has a press pass in addition to her astronomer one, so while she checks up on the schedule it gives me time to catch up on my reading…

… but not for too long because on the very first day there is a LOFAR press conference to attend!  My friends here are gearing up to tell the world that our radio telescope is up and running, and they did such a good job that Nature and Science picked up the story!  Hooray!

The next day there was special session at the conference all about the first science results with LOFAR!  There is lots to pay attention to during the talks, from pulsars to cosmic rays, and it is cool to see all the kinds of science you can do with a radio telescope.

I should mention that AAS is a huge conference with about three thousand astronomers attending this year, and it feels like there are hundreds and hundreds of posters and sessions.  Even if you could never do it all though it makes me a little giddy to realize how you could learn about anything in the universe if you wanted to.  I might not know a thing about interstellar dust, for example, but it is nice to see a session for it listed and know someone out there is interested and discussing it!

Special session done, it is now time to help out at the ASTRON booth in the exhibit hall a bit.  My role is drawing people in when they ask “what is that animal?” about me, though because we are in Texas many mistakenly assume I am an armadillo.  Hmph!

There are of course lots of other booths and posters to look at in the exhibit hall, so eventually it is time to go exploring!  One booth I just had to visit was the one behind the Australian Square Kilometer Array (SKA) initiative, where I made friends with a kookaburra and a man who had a very strange accent.  He told me that the decision to build the SKA will be made in just a few months time, between Australia and South Africa.  As I mentioned before I’m crossing my paws for South Africa, of course, but wouldn’t mind making new friends in Oz either!

Finally it is the last day of the conference and time for the most important work of all- Yvette’s poster about AARTFAAC!  Yvette fielded a bunch of complicated questions quite brilliantly (and Artie wouldn’t lie to you, would he? -Y), and more than one person paused to give me a back scratch.  So quite a success all around!  The only thing that was not enjoyable was having the poster on the very last day of the conference, as there were lots of people Yvette hadn’t seen in years who stopped by but there wasn’t enough time to catch up properly.  Oh well, next time!

Work done, it’s finally time to walk down Congress Avenue to the Texas Capitol and take advantage of those 2nd Amendment rights I’ve heard so much about!  I also learned a lot about Texas history while here, like the War of Northern Aggression where people in the South, animated by the spirit of 1776, died for state rights guaranteed under the Constitution when the North resorted to coercion.  Well that’s what the memorial plaque on the grounds says anyway, Yvette says it was mysteriously missing a few key details about the whole affair.

After all that, it is time to return to Holland.  I really enjoyed Austin and AAS though as I got to meet lots of cool people, learn a lot of new things, and enjoy a lot of good food. (They have fire ants here! So much tastier than bland Dutch ones! Though Yvette preferred the Mexican, steak, and BBQ).  It was so much fun to see so many astronomers and what they do!

No I’d never been to East Africa before, but when did such details stop me?  About a month of wandering through Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda ensued after this, first recovering from thesis work on the Zanzibar beaches, then heading inland for a safari and to meet up with my brother in Nairobi.  From there we went on some more safari-ing in Kenya, then up to Uganda where we paddled the mighty source of the Nile and got to track wild mountain gorillas… and I infamously got punched by one of them.  2011: year of the gorilla punch.

After that, because Patrick wanted to explore China, I was game, and it was a dirt cheap flight, we headed to Hong Kong and started slowly, methodically working our way westward to Tibet and Nepal.  I’m honestly still not certain what I think of China- the history and culture are incredible, the pandas are adorable, and the terra-cotta warriors alone made it worth our while, but I have a hard time believing that a country where people go to the bathroom on the side of the road and bans Facebook will become the leader of the world.  Perhaps someday, but it’s not exactly a straight line to that end goal is my point… though in a few years when more of it resembles Hong Kong perhaps I will change my mind…

Plus there was the matter of Tibet.  I will never forget Tibet, from the epic 48 hour train ride to Lhasa where there are military guards with weapons on every street corner, to the palaces and temples that had more gold than I’d imagined could exist, to the tears of pride in my eyes as I surveyed Mount Everest Base Camp.  Tibet was decidedly not China in every way your mind tells you you’re in a different country… until you’d see another Chinese flag flapping in the breeze or reach another roadblock and be reminded of this fact.  It’s not realistic to think Tibet will become its own country someday (as there are now more eight times more Chinese living there than Tibetans), but the Tibetans we met along the way are determined to hold onto their culture.  I hope they do.

After Tibet, late April found us going down to the low-to-us elevation of Kathmandu where I said goodbye to Patrick as he flew back to the USA.  I spent almost all of the following month in Nepal recuperating my strength by (I evidently have a strange sense of the word) learning to whitewater kayak, canyoning, paragliding… and doing an interview via Skype that led to my acceptance to graduate school in astronomy at the University of Amsterdam!  For someone who’d dreamed of what Nepal must be like as a girl it was certainly great to see that it was just as lovely and adventurous a place as I’d imagined, even if general strikes occasionally meant you had to walk to the airport because there were no motor vehicles to be had.

But anyway, after three months of the 3rd world it was time to return to the USA by way of Europe so I could admire how cool potable tap water is.  I visited Amsterdam for the first time with which I got smitten (still am), along with Hungary, Germany, and Ireland before landing in the USA in June.  Summer was spent doing various things such as helping my parents clear out my childhood home which was put on the market, getting my first article published in Astronomy magazine, and wandering a bit around New England and Quebec.  You know, fairly normal stuff for a change, plus getting ready to move to Holland…

My European life began just a few days before September, first picking up my citizenship papers in Hungary (I am an official dual citizen now!) and then doing all the frantic finding an apartment/ buying a bicycle/ settling into a new workplace things that all moves tend to entail, but this time with more Dutch.  While some of the process was a little frustrating (it took me almost a month to get a cell phone for example), I won’t dwell on this because I love my life in Amsterdam too much to do so.  You can do anything in Amsterdam that you’d want to do- admire some masterpieces, head to the beach, eat sushi at 2am, play around with RFI data for radio telescopes, learn improv, hop on a train and be in a different country in two hours… the choices are endless, and I love the city so much I already feel like my program length of four years is too short!

So after all that, what’s in store for 2012?  Well there will be some more wandering but on a smaller scale- I’m currently writing this from Florida where I’m visiting family for the holidays, and will visit Austin, Texas before heading back for the 2012 American Astronomical Society conference (yes, Artie Aardvark will be there!).  Then after that, well, nothing definite- I am looking forward to spending 2012 exploring Europe, but I’m mainly looking forward to just living life in Amsterdam.  They say you are soon immune of the beauty and charm of a place when you live there but I’m happy to confirm this is not the case- if anything, I’m becoming a bit of an Amsterdam snob as on a recent trip to Paris I found myself thinking “Paris is nice, but it’s no Amsterdam…”  Yes, there is clearly no hope for me, but it’s rather nice to live in what you’re convinced is the prettiest city in the world right?

It’s been a helluva year.  Here’s to wishing the very best to you and yours in 2012- and if you find yourself passing through Amsterdam at any point, be sure to let me know.

Zwarte Piet is a little black boy who these days is played by Dutchmen who dresses up in blackface and a curly wig, making this the only country I know of that seems to think this is still acceptable since, say, the 1920s.  Dutch people will tell you that it’s not racist though because it’s a tradition and everyone loves Zwarte Piet, but don’t bother pointing out that everyone loves Uncle Remus too- it’s like shooting fish in a barrel in terms of how hard it is to start a heated dialogue about this.

Anyway, once we’re done with the Dutch national pastime of arguing about controversial issues it’s time for a much more important one: poking fun at the annual Sinterklaas party!  Sinterklaas arrives each year on December 5 (meaning Dutch kids get their presents then, not at Christmas), but for bigger kids a bit of a Secret Santa ensues with a twist.  Instead of only pulling someone’s name for a present exchange, the present itself is immaterial and what matters instead is the poem and wrapping that goes into the gift which should be a bit of a roast about the person.  So for example a soccer player had to shoot a few goals, one fellow who’s had bad luck with the ladies had to undergo a speed dating course, a pianist got a miniature piano of construction paper… and I got a personalized pop-up book that you can see above (the cover is modeled after Sinterklaas’s book which holds the names of the good kids).

Now for the present I had to prepare, for those of you who don’t know me in the real world I happen to enjoy writing epic poems.  So when I pulled Thijs, a fellow PhD who also works for our mutual adviser Ralph (who recently became department head and got rather busy as a result), there was only one option in my mind…

Thijs’s Saga

Many a great tale has been said
About those who watch the sky,
Of their great tribulations
When Sinterklaas comes by-
But of all these tales big and small
No greater story has been told
Than that of our valiant hero:
A man named Thijs the Bold.

It all began not long ago
On a day of pouring rain
And Thijs was sitting at his desk
Thinking hard, but in vain
He’d been a PhD for months
But was still none the wiser
Because he didn’t know what to do
Thanks to an absentee adviser.

“Where’s Ralph gone to?”
Thijs muttered, as he let out a sigh
“Oooh I know! Pick me!”
He heard a very small voice cry.
He looked about- no one in
But then he caught the creature’s stare
And said a pleasant hello
To Artie Aardvark sitting there.

You all know those in Ralph’s group
Get a stuffed aardvark when new
But I bet you didn’t know that
These creatures can speak too!
In fact they’re quite intelligent
Although a little shy
So you have to gain their trust
Before they’ll give talk a try.

“Oh noble aardvark,” our hero said
“Do you know where Ralph has gone?
Because ever since I’ve started here
He’s been awf’ly withdrawn.”
“I know Thijs! But it’s awful
Perhaps the worst case I’ve seen
Ralph’s been lured into a trap
By none other than the Dean!

“Deep within Old Amsterdam
Where the whores and tourists roam
That evil creature called the Dean
Has made his office home
He’ll book meetings with advisers
From that base of his reign,
But it’s a trap! Once they enter
No adviser’s seen again.”

“That’s not so bad,” said Thijs
But the aardvark shook his head-
“Alas if he’s not rescued soon
Ralph will surely be dead!
And then you’ll just keep sitting here
And leave without a degree
Because without Ralph you won’t know how
To get a PhD…”

“Well then,” said Thijs, “I’ll go at once
And spring him from this trap!
I’d like to graduate, and besides
He seems like a nice chap.
There’s just one problem Artie
I’m really still quite new
And saving Ralph from the Dean
Isn’t a thing I know how to do…”

Thijs sat there and pondered
For he’s a theorist obsessive
Who knows a lot of hard maths
That sound awfully impressive
“Of course!” he finally shouted out
When the wheels fin’ly clicked
To save Ralph I’ll resort to
A quantum mechanics trick!”

You know those stuffed aardvarks?
Each is exactly the same
And in quantum mechanics
Is a theoretician’s claim
That two particles, though separate
Can exchange information
So long as someone works out
The waveform’s calculation.

And if he knew one aardvark’s waveform, why
It would be the same as another’s
And then Artie could see instantly
What was seen by his brothers
And years ago, Thijs the Bold knew
Ralph gave an aardvark to the Dean
So he just needed to calculate a waveform
And then know what that fellow’s seen!

So Thijs the Bold got busy
And began scribbling on his paper
He worked all night furiously
To follow through with this caper
Then finally at the break of dawn
It was clear he was in the right vocation
For the paper on his desk contained
The Aardvark Waveform Equation.

“Oh! I can see the room!” Thijs heard
From the aardvark by his side
“But this trial won’t be easy
Based on what I see inside-
There are all sorts of traps and tricks
In a complicated scene
Plus at the end, of course
You’ll have to fight the Dean…

“Oh Thijs! I fear you’re not prepared
For what trials lie ahead
And you can’t exactly rescue Ralph
If you yourself are dead
If only there was someone to ask
Who could help us in our cause…
Wait! There’s one man who might help
Let’s go ask Sinterklaas!”

There was a good stroke of luck
For Artie’s friends with Amerigo
So to find Sinterklaas himself
The aardvark knew the way to go
So they set off for Old Amsterdam
Through the canals and winding streets
And found the horse and man swiftly
In a huge crowd of Zwarte Piets.

“Ah Thijs, it’s you!” Sinterklaas said
“I hear you’ve been good this year
So I can help and outfit you
With your quest’s needed gear
But first, a test! Beside me-
A magic sword mired in stone.
Can you pull it out? A worthy man
Can yank it out alone.”

[At this point Thijs found his present was a sword in a stone, and had to pull it out.]

“Hurrah!” said Thijs, “let’s go now!
And dank u, Sinterklaas!”
And our heroes ran into the night
On their respective feet and paws
And they ran into Old Amsterdam
To find the evil Dean’s lair
They found it quickly thanks to Artie
Whose brother told him where.

They came to a tall canal house
And snuck into the ground floor
But once inside their eyes opened wide
At terror to great to ignore
For at their presence stone gargoyles
Which had been silently watching sentry
Awoke, growled, and attacked
When our heroes made their entry!

“Look out!” the little aardvark cried
But Thijs the Bold was not afraid
He swung at those evil sentries
With his magic sword’s blade
He swooped and parried like a pro
And then with a final thrust
Each gargoyle was speared in the heart
And crumbled into dust!

So Thijs the Bold and Artie
Ran forward up the stair
And down the hall that they’d heard
Was the way to the Dean’s lair
And finally they found it:
A great door of polished wood
And when Thijs wrestled it aside
What he saw wasn’t good.

Here lurked the evil Dean creature
With sinister eyes shining bright
A lesser man under its stare
Would have surely died of fright
But not Thijs the Bold! He looked about
And knew what had to be done
He drew his blade as it attacked:
The battle had begun!

To describe the Battle of Thijs and Dean
Would go on for many pages
But it will suffice to just say this:
It was a battle of the ages
And in the end our victor
Hit the evil creature’s head
And the magic sword worked! The Dean fell
And was most definitely dead!

“Hoorah!” was Artie Aardvark’s shout
As Thijs ran and set Ralph free
And they ran back to Science Park
With great thanks from the detainee
But as they returned Ralph soon showed
The effects of the Dean’s last spell
For he forgot all that had happened
Which was probably just as well.

“Ah Thijs! I was looking for you!”
Was Ralph’s happy cry,
“I need some new calculations
That you ought to give a try
“I want those by tomorrow, please
And when you’re finished with that caper
By this time next week
I’d like to see the first draft of a paper…”

Our hero gave a huge sigh
For a present adviser’s a mixed blessing:
You’re on track to someday graduate
But your work is much more pressing
But this PhD took solace
In that he’d averted disaster
And Thijs the Bold, I have been told
Lived happily ever after.

Anyway, the poem went over rather well as I suspect it’s a rare guy who wouldn’t want to be in the center of a saga where he’s the hero, but I couldn’t post it until now because one spends the next few weeks after a Sinterklaas party trying to work out who did what.  Things have all been worked out by now though, and my adviser quite enjoyed the poem too (although I might have an interesting time if I ever meet the Dean someday…).

Dutch Sinterklaas-time has certainly been an interesting one.  I’m definitely looking forward to next year!

Luxembourg City is a rather nice little town today and pretty perfect for a daytrip if you ask me- we got a nice walking tour map from the tourist office which we combined with some geocaches in the area, and wandered all about.  As in seriously, while I don’t say this often by the end of the day I’m confident that both of us felt like we’d “done” Luxembourg, which isn’t to say it wasn’t nice so much as that it was very small!

So anyway, during the typical wanderings about it was all quite pretty- it’s one of those never bombed or modernized lovely old cities of Europe- complete with the requisite castle ruins, fort, church, etc.  I will say that they definitely had some lovely details and examples of public art around here-

Public art is actually one of those things that has impressed me since I moved to Europe by the way- I won’t say I didn’t notice it on previous trips, but it certainly adds a lot more to a place when there’s a carving on the side of a building exposed to the elements which would be stowed away inside a museum back at home.  Life is just that much nicer when you just have to go out into the street to see beautiful things!

By the end of the day when we were waiting for our train back to Paris the both of us were worn out from all the walking, but filled with the quiet satisfaction one gets from having explored a previously unknown corner of the world (or was that just the wine for the ride back?).  My thanks to Nick for suggesting this daytrip in the first place, as I don’t know if or when I would have thought to head to Luxembourg myself!  I guess that’s what travel friends are for.

The December 2011 issue of Astronomy is currently out at all major newsstands and bookstores, and you should check it out because my second article for them appears in it!  Specifically the article is “Visit Southern California’s Top Astronomy Sites” on p. 61, and is a sequel to my article in the July 2011 issue.  And I’d say more, but I’m currently busily writing my third article that is due next week (my first feature, on cosmic rays!) and 2,200 words don’t write themselves!

In other news, I’ve been taking an improv comedy course of late and my first set is this Friday, November 25!   In short it’s at the Crea at 11:30pm after the regular show and will last a half hour or so, and is FREE!  It should be a good time- there is also a “proper” show starting at 10:30pm, and that will cost you 5 Euro (and an 8:30pm show that runs an hour that’s 10 Euro, but you can see both for 12 Euro).  Details are here.

Mind this set is primarily practice for my class’s “real” Improv show that will be on Dec 9 at 10:30pm and run an hour, also at the Crea.  If you can only make one that will be the one to see- I’m not saying this Friday will be awful or anything, it’s just shorter and later obviously.  It’s 5 Euro to go to this show and reservations are recommended.

It should be super fun times, and I hope to see you all there!  And if you’ll excuse me, my code’s done running…

Now time for a spoiler alert: the final score was 1-0, and if you know anything about the sport you know it wasn’t the Americans who scored the goal.  But it was my first big live national soccer match, and how you not have a good time with awesome seats like these-

Before you ask, these seats cost 10 Euros.  Really!  The reason is it’s not exactly like the American section is going to fill up at a soccer match in Paris, even when it’s a super tiny sliver of maybe 2% of all the seats in the stadium, so they were trying rather hard to get rid of them.  So hey that’s really awesome, except I am probably now spoiled for any future games I’ll attend.

The other thing to note is that even when you’re seriously outnumbered in the USA section that doesn’t mean the security is anything less than insane (and overall much more heightened even for the general crowd than any sports match would be in the USA, as the yellow jacket guards above show).  Not only were we in our own little gated area with a fence separating us from the rest of the crowd with tickets thoroughly checked to make sure no Frenchies snuck in, we had our own security detail!
Two of said security detail looking bored as hell, and the press photographers for good measure as they were kinda cool to watch.  The thing about all the security was I never quite worked out whether they were there to protect us from the French or to protect the French from the Americans in case we all brought our guns to the game or something.  All I know is it just seemed a little excessive to worry so much about the American presence inducing soccer hooliganism on either side because dude, it’s the American team.  In soccer.  Plus we were all patted down upon entering the stadium so not like we smuggled in our automatic weapons.
Anyway, it was definitely a fun game though my only wish was that it would’ve been nice for the Americans to score a goal so we could all go crazy a bit like the French are in the above picture when they scored their goal.  But alas it was a rather lopsided match in talent and refereeing- I know the losing side often invokes the latter, but I suspect soccer hasn’t caught on much in the USA yet because referees miss so many fouls- so there we are.  But hey, the beauty of Europe is it’s not like going to a big soccer match will be all that hard to do in the future!

A great view back towards the city center while climbing Arthur’s Seat, the bump of a hill to the left in the previous picture.  At 251 meters tall I don’t think anyone would call it a serious hill, but it’s definitely taller than anything in Holland so there we are (the tallest point in the Netherlands is ~360 meters at the southernmost tip of the country on the border between Germany and Belgium).  The incredible thing about the summit though was how incredibly windy it was up there- it felt like a bloody gale to the point where I didn’t dare stand up as getting blown off the top seemed like a probable outcome.  I guess they’re called windswept highlands for a reason, right?

It was a nice little trek outside the city proper though, nice enough that the next afternoon I felt motivated to catch a bus for a half hour ride out to Rosslyn Chapel-
Built in the 14th century, Rosslyn Chapel is a lovely little church in the countryside that has gone through various states of neglect over the years and is finally undergoing some long-awaited renovations since The Da Vinci Code was filmed in part here (they used to get 30k visitors a year and now average three times that).  While you can indeed go into the crypt to confirm that there is indeed no hidden trapdoor down there like the book/movie said, the church inside is actually incredibly lovely.  It feels like every square inch of it was devoted to some lovely carving or ornate statue, and countless little stories presented themselves in the details if you paid close enough attention.  No pictures were allowed inside unfortunately, but you can get an idea of the interior on the Wikipedia page.

Finally, Sunday afternoon chapel visit aside, it was a lovely fall afternoon so I couldn’t resist a hike in Roslin Glen below the church-

It’s a rather nice glen, but what really got me excited was how it was actually autumn here!  What I mean by this is while the Dutch weather hasn’t been bad since I arrived, it just hasn’t felt like fall at all because it never gets as cold as back home and the leaves don’t change color much either as a result.  So there has been no sharp bite in the air while navigating muddy pathways, no admiring foliage on forest paths, and certainly no hills to clamber up and down, so making up for it in a weekend was rather nice.

Plus it turned out there is one final thing in Edinburgh that they do right that they unfortunately don’t do nowhere near as well in Holland- Halloween!

(Posed with one of a group of several Ghostbusters and the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man.)

Because I went to Edinburgh straight from work on Friday I decided to take my cowboy hat to work (I was a cowgirl this year), which drew a bit of attention because the Dutch don’t really do cowboy hats, Halloween, or expecting to find a party they weren’t invited to some time in advance.  So I was delighted to discover that Halloween is actually huge in Edinburgh- all accommodation was sold out by people wanting to do “ghost tours,” everywhere was decorated to the gills, and you would have looked silly without a costume on Saturday night.  Just like in the USA!  Well, maybe with less beer and more whiskey.

So all in all a good weekend- luck with the weather, some nice adventures, and a bit of a reminder of things I was missing out on while in Europe.  Based on the experience, I think my “you can be in another country in an hour?!” excitement is still very well placed!

Astronaut in question was Apollo 15 command module pilot (read: didn’t land on the moon) Al Worden, who was in Amsterdam to do a book signing. And I’m so glad I did because he was a neat guy who loved to talk about space and his experiences… quite the gentleman in fact.  Just a handful of folks showed up for the event, and I was a few minutes late but the Q&A session was in full swing already talking about space policy and the like.  Then we got into a bit of talk about what Apollo 15 was like, interspersed with lots of fun “details you’ve never heard about” type material.  A random sampling:

- Apollo 15 was the first mission to head to higher latitudes on the moon 30+ degrees from the equator, and they didn’t have the gravity quite figured out for higher latitudes yet.  So Worden woke up one day while they were down on the surface to see the mountain near the landing site looked above him… first thought was “we’re dead” followed by talk to Mission Control and the two on the surface coming back a little earlier than expected, turns out the command module was a mere 4 miles above the mountain.  Yikes!

- Apparently the three on Apollo 15 were all Air Force guys but they were backup for Apollo 12 that was all Navy, so when the two others landed to go “play army” (a term that cracked me up) Al made sure Mission Control played them the Air Force theme at one point.

- At one point the other two astronauts on the moon at the time were told to go take a sleeping pill and sleep for 8 hours, they refused because work needed to be done. Later they learned the reason was James Irwin, one of the fellows, was having a seriously irregular heartbeat and wasn’t too far from having a heart attack on the moon… he later had his first major heart attack six months after the flight, had several bad ones (including quadruple bypass surgery) until finally dying of one in the 90s. As he never showed any symptoms pre-flight it’s never been figured out whether he had a preexisting condition or whether 2 weeks in outer space did it.

- It turns out if you go into space your heart rate after orbit can get as low as 12 beats a minute but then increase to a normal pace, and when Worden got back to Earth his heart rate went up to 120 a few hours after. I asked what he felt the physical effects were after returning and he said he didn’t feel his heart beating hard or anything like that, but rather automatic motions like walking and picking something up were conscious decisions for some time. You just literally don’t reach far enough to grab something after being in space because you’re not compensating for gravity.

- After returning to Earth (Worden piloted the whole way, one parachute burned up just before splashdown) they got into a bit of trouble for something prior astronauts had done but no one had cared about and wasn’t illegal- namely taking some postal covers and selling some to finance their kids’ future educations (astronauts at the time made ~$52k/year in today’s money). But they decided to make an example of said astronauts so he got fired from the astronaut corps and sent out to NASA Ames in California to finish his Air Force time, something he said was good in hindsight as it’s not like he was going to be an astronaut again cause all missions were booked for the next ten years.

Anyway if you’re still reading this tome, after all that I got in line to get my book signed and when it was my turn Al Worden gave me a look and a no-nonsense “so what do you do?” I swear someday I’ll not be surprised by this all the time, but turns out cute young American ladies don’t usually show up in such geeky crowds making intelligent references to physics and engineering during discussions.  Who’d've thunk?

When I explained who I was he got quite happy and excited, then proceeded to tell me how he later heard that while he was on the far side of the moon and officially the most isolated person of all time (almost 3000km away from any other person) they estimated he saw a million stars in the sky. Normally on Earth you see only a few thousand stars!  I genuinely don’t know if I’d ever been so jealous of someone I’d met before, and he rounded it off with philosophical quote- “What is infinity? We don’t know, and I’ve seen more of infinity with my own eyes than anyone else has. You think about it and realize we don’t know a thing- just imagine if you took one of our telescopes and put it out there for starters.”

As I said, a great guy!  And to conclude, this was obviously a super awesome event that I seriously enjoyed and all that. And I highly recommend you go out of your way to meet an Apollo astronaut over the next few years- they were all born in the 1930s if not earlier, and the facts of life dictate that there are only a few years more where guys like Al Worden can tell us firsthand what it’s like to explore another world.

On the last day of Nova school we spent the afternoon going to see the Westerbork radio telescopes, which is about 20 kilometers from ASTRON.  I passed my time on the bus ride making friends with all the astronomers.

After a long drive through the rain we made it- hooray!  The telescopes looked awfully impressive, as all 14 of them were pointed in the same direction tracking a source in the sky.

Here is one of the telescopes up close.  The Westerbork telescopes are interesting because they have an equatorial mount, meaning one axis is parallel to the Earth’s rotation, and most radio telescopes have azimuthal mounts.  This means the Westerbork telescopes can track something in the sky by moving only one axis, but most radio telescopes require two!

After the telescopes detect a radio signal all that information comes here to the correlator, where all the signals are put together so the astronomers can analyze what they see.  There were lots of wires running everywhere- it looks awfully complicated to run a radio telescope!

I also got to see a test of the next generation technology for radio telescopes called EMBRACE, which looked like a giant field of spikes if you ask me.  Basically over the next decade or so radio astronomers are hoping to build the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which will do exactly what the name sounds like, put an array over an entire square kilometer.  Wow!  Something very, very big like that also needs parts that aren’t too expensive, so they’re hoping to use EMBRACE to show how this telescope of the future will work exactly.

I was also excited to learn that next year they will announce the location of the Square Kilometer Array, either in western Australia or South Africa.  I’m crossing my paws for South Africa to be picked of course!

After that it was time for one last paparazzi shoot, with my friend Oscar’s help-

And after all that excitement I was tired, and snuggled into a pouch in Yvette’s poncho-Hmmm, these kangaroo-style pouches are quite comfy.  Perhaps I won’t mind if they build the SKA in Australia after all!

Oh my goodness I’m so excited, I’m on my way to ASTRON to see what astronomers do!  Here I am on the train looking at the Dutch countryside.  It is very flat and filled with farms so far as I can see.When we made it to ASTRON I could tell because the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope was poking out of the trees!  This was the biggest radio telescope in the world in the 1950s, but now is used by hobbyists.  They do things like detect neutron star pulses and talk to people in around the world by bouncing radio signals off of the moon.  It sounds like a fun hobby to me!

To get close to the telescope we had to put on hardhats.  Mine was a little bit too big…

Nowadays at ASTRON the astronomers help build and run lots of astronomy projects all around the world, and some are even in space!  Here I am inspecting some models of instruments ASTRON is working on for future projects.  I also liked the aluminum blocks on the right side of the table, showing how a heavy solid block could be made a lot lighter by drilling and hollowing out the inside.

I also got to check out a mirror polisher up close that is used to give a telescope mirror the right shape.  I was amazed to learn that “right shape” for astronomers can mean within the thickness of one of my hairs!

In the middle of the tour I got tired, and decided to get some coffee…

… which was good because I was alert enough to help the engineers keep an eye on things at JIVE headquarters!  JIVE is short for Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, and VLBI is short for Very Long Baseline Interferometry.  It is funny that astronomers like acronyms so much that they have acronyms of acronyms.

JIVE is really cool because they take radio telescopes from all over the world and link them together to make more detailed observations than if you were just using the one telescope.  They can do stuff like pinpoint where a mission orbiting Mars is within meters!

This map shows where telescopes involved with JIVE are around the world.  And all those signals end up here in Holland!

Tour done, it was time to listen to some lectures.  Yvette was at ASTRON this week for Nova School, a program aimed at first year astronomy PhD students in the Netherlands, so there was a lot of learning for a little aardvark like me.  At least I could help Yvette with her talk on AARTFAAC!  She and my other friends on the team are hoping to monitor the night sky 24/7 to find rare radio outbursts from mystery objects like neutron stars and black holes, and I’m excited to see what they find.

After all that it’s time for a rest, so I’ll talk about some other adventures later.  Thanks to Daniela for helping with the pictures!