An Edinburgh Weekend

Because I am still quite the “you mean I can be in another country in an hour?!” shock that comes from living in Europe, last weekend I went to Edinburgh.  Now I’ve actually been to Edinburgh before and left the place rather smitten, so when I was thinking of going on a break someplace I knew and where they spoke English, it was a bit of a no-brainer when the airfare was cheap to boot.  It’s not like I’ve met a Dutchman who didn’t speak English, mind, it’s just incredibly novel to get on a bus and realize you can read all the signs after losing that ability two months prior! Continue reading

In Which I Meet Apollo 15 Astronaut Al Worden

Only 24 people have ever flown to the moon, and I met one of them in Amsterdam last week! Continue reading

Artie Aardvark Wanders Around Westerbork

To continue our series with Artie, everyone’s favorite aardvark, here is the little scamp exploring the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT).

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!

Artie Aardvark’s Amazing ASTRON Adventures

Before we begin, I’d like to introduce you to my new friend Artie Aardvark.  Artie is the mascot of the AARTFAAC (pronounced “aardvark”) project that I work for at the University of Amsterdam, where we look for transient radio signals from the sky.  Because Artie takes his job seriously he has volunteered to explain Interesting and Important Astronomy Sites this blog may visit, as he rightly assumes that he can explain technical stuff in a better and cuter way than I would myself.  So with that I give you Artie’s Amazing ASTRON Adventures, where ASTRON is the Netherlands institute for radio astronomy ~100km east of Amsterdam.

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!

Photo: Zandfoort Beach

I’m not saying the weather in Holland is strange, I’m just saying it was warm and sunny enough today to head to the beach on October 1st!  Though to be fair the Dutch find the current weather rather strange too…

The closest beach to Amsterdam is at Zandvoort aan Zee, which is a half hour train ride from Amsterdam. (A bit crowded, sure, but you are a half hour from Amsterdam!) Zandvoort isn’t exactly a pretty beach town- it’s made out of concrete like it’s going out of style sort of thing- but it’s a good beach and has plenty of Dutch children frolicking in it who clearly don’t realize the North Sea is friggin’ cold!

All in all a great day and I’ll leave you with a cool sand sculpture in case you’re not sold on it-

A Weekend In Bruges

Because I am incapable of sitting still, I decided to celebrate my one month anniversary in Europe by taking a trip to Bruges, Belgium.  A lovely sunny weekend in a town so lovely that if Disney had built it we’d all hate it and claim it’s unrealistic-

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Photo: Dwingeloo Radio Observatory

Snapped on my first trip outside Amsterdam in the Netherlands, this is Dwingeloo Radio Observatory.  Constructed in the 1950s, it has a diameter of 25 meters which at the time made it the largest radio telescope in the world.  These days it’s no longer used for research and instead just by amateur radio enthusiasts, but it’s still located right by ASTRON, the headquarters for astronomy research in the Netherlands near the village of Dwingeloo.

Honestly I will be out at ASTRON so many times over the next few years I don’t feel obliged to give a full tour yet (already scheduled to go out twice next month, once for a full week!), but I thought it was a rather nice bit of scientific history to find hiding in a remote corner of Holland.

Dutch Culture Shock

Whenever you move to a new country it turns out many people are rather curious about the state of your culture shock.  Some have even asked me if I have much thanks to my travel/ Hungarian background, and the answer is of course a few things have popped up though I’m not going to be weirded out by, say, the existence of trams or that the plugs are different.  I mean I wanted to move here because it would be different!

That said, here are a few things that I’ve noticed are rather different in the Netherlands- and a few that actually I expected to be problems that really aren’t… Continue reading

Settling Into Amsterdam Life

Things are coming along- a few days ago I moved into an incredibly lovely apartment in Amsterdam!  And while there are a few hundred too many folks stopping by this blog daily to allow for a full tour of the premises, this is literally the view of the canal when I step out onto my tiny balcony-
When not stopping to check after each rain squall whether that low-lying boat with the blue tarp has sunk yet (there are a surprising number of sunk and presumed abandoned boats in the Amsterdam canals) I am enchanted and can’t stop admiring the view.  Isn’t it exactly what you imagine a view from an Amsterdam apartment to look like?  Not to mention there’s always something going on on the water, from tourist boats to pleasure boats to ducks and gulls and even swans.

I should also mention that said little balcony with an amazing view also has a now-barren flag pole, so I was getting all excited to fly a Dutch flag until I was told it’s actually illegal to fly one if you’re a private citizen on all but 5 days of the year for reasons I cannot begin to fathom!  I really can’t say I’ve ever heard of such a rule before in any country…

Anyway, this is another shot taken just a little bit down the road from me which I include here because it contains the elaborate spire of Westerkerk (literally, “the Western church”) which is the largest Protestant church in the Netherlands and even where the current Queen Beatrix was married- Rembrandt was buried here too, though no one’s entirely certain where.  You can’t quite see it from my apartment as there is a tree in the way (though that will likely change come winter) but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear it- the clock tower chimes every 15 minutes without fail, and you can hear it from anywhere in this part of the city.

The thing is you probably knew about the Westerkerk chimes but realize it- the exact same chimes today are the ones Anne Frank mentioned it in her diary as she hid a stone’s throw from the church.  The Anne Frank House is just a few blocks from mine actually and Westerkerk still plays the exact same chimes today, so it’s quite something to ponder how we’re neighbors in three dimensions albeit not in the fourth.And if an address isn’t enough I now have what most will tell you really qualifies you for living in the Netherlands- a proper Dutch bicycle!  I got mine at the market and it’s known as an oma fiets, literally “grandma’s bicycle,” which is just the name of the style and not an insult before you guys get ideas about my taste. *wink* The thing that has struck everyone about the bicycle is its color- virtually all bicycles in Holland are black so I opted to pay a few extra Euro for one I could find in a crowd.  Still need a name but I’m trying to not get terribly attached- despite heavy-duty locks the Dutch joke that “all bikes are really rentals” has more than an element of truth to it.

I should also mention it’s rather interesting riding a Dutch bike as they’re pedal breaks like a child’s bike in the USA instead of hand ones, and while a single speed isn’t an issue most of the time it does leave some huffing and puffing in some places.  Not to mention the absolute insanity of some of the normal cycling that goes on around here, but that’s probably a story for another day.  The Westerkerk clock is telling me it’s time for bed!

Snapshot: Giant Dutch Clogs

Just checking in with this rather touristy but still fun photo in Amsterdam.  Made it here a few nights ago and am glad to confirm I have already taken care of what’s most pressing on everyone’s mind- yes, I got a Museumkaart which allows free admission to virtually every museum in the Netherlands!  And have already almost made it all back in just a weekend of museum visiting…

For the minority with more mundane concerns, the Great Amsterdam Apartment Search continues but will hopefully be resolved soon.  More later when things are more settled!