Winter isn't coming

... or it's already here and it's shy. It tends to be rainy a lot, so there is potential for snow its just never gets cold enough. On the other hand, it's great motivation for staying in to study. There are so many unanswered questions, not for lack of answering them. The way it goes is you unlock one puzzle and find another several.

I'm beginning to think that if there is a creator, even they don't know how everything works. They just fiddle with knobs and see what happens.

Field excursion to WSRT, LOFAR, and ASTRON

We started out the day with a rainbow at 09:00.

Can you imagine this in your backyard?

Yesterday our radio astronomy class had a field trip to the northern parts of the Netherlands. There reside several important astronomical, and research and development facilities: the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope (WRST), the LOw Frequency Array for Radio astronomy (LOFAR), and ASTROnomy institute Netherlands for radio astronomy (ASTRON).

WRST is an array of 14 of these massive dishes. Tried to capture that here.

The telescopes that radio astronomers use are different than you might imagine, in that they do not use mirrors and lenses to view visible light, but rather radio dishes to capture light at wavelengths far greater that the eye can see. We use the voltages induced in metal antennas, and math to reconstruct the sky image in the radio spectrum.

We started out by driving 2 hours north of Leiden to visit WRST. A sad story: Westerbork was the site of a Nazi concentration camp. 102,000 Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals passed through that camp on transit to Germany to be executed. The area now houses one of the worlds finest radio astronomy instruments, and a memorial ground for the lost souls. Dutch author Harry Mulisch wrote a novel about this odd arrangement of science and wretched past. It is a reportedly amazing story, and a movie was made about it "The Discovery of Heaven" (2001), with the amazing Stephen Fry as main character. I want to see it.

A radio dish, part of WRST.

Top secret EMBRACE phased-array proto-type for the Square-Kilometer Array (SKA).

After visiting WRST we drove a further 45 minutes north to the core site of LOFAR. LOFAR is a huge radio array built by ASTRON, with international components scattered around the globe, but the core site is the main and biggest part of the array. The whole international array produces about 8GB of data per second. One observation lasts ~12-hours, and thus takes up about 330TB. How do they transmit so much data around the world you may ask? 

Well first of all, an optical fibre is a cable with glass wires which transmit data at the speed of light, and these cables now connect internet users all over the globe. How else would you download all your HD movies so quickly? If each of these cables consist of about 24 glass wires, LOFAR rents about 18 of these from your internet provider and uses them to transmit their (more important) radio data. Actually, when we observe the data rates for internet users in South African plummet. Sorry!

	Top left: A small part of core array of LOFAR. This part of the Netherlands is supposedly being returned to nature, except for our invisible hand. Bottom left: Arthur is looking at technology similar to EMBRACE, housed in Styrofoam protective casings.  Top right: In the middle of nowhere are  these boxes with the fastest connections in existence funnelling data to other parts of the world.

After WRST, and LOFAR, we made our way to the main research and development centre where ASTRON conducts some of the most advanced fabrication of astronomical components. The technological reach of astronomy is vast. Most of the results of astronomy's R&D lead to advancment in publicly available technology. We drive the need for faster data transfer, better communication, and obviously the exploration of space. Hello, asteroid mining anyone?

A super-awesome borrel at ASTRON before
the 2 hour ride home. Mind you we took
the extra wine bottles with us, so...

At the end of our tour of ASTRON we celebrated profusely, yes profusely, as in we sweated out all our pent up fatigue with drinks and tasty Hors d'oeuvres, and I got to see the sun set over the returned-to-nature-Netherlands.

We arrived back home around 21:30, and one thing I must say is, don't drink a lot of alcohol before/during a long ride when there are no toilets on the bus.

The picture at the bottom is taken from a platform on top of an old radio dish which was repurposed into a pretty cool amateur astronomer instrument. Actually, the amateur astronomers use it now sometimes to communicate with other amateurs by bouncing and receiving signals off the moon! Pretty cool!

The sun setting beautifully over the Dutch Heide (moorland) from the top of one of those big dishes.

Bad Luck

I had a tight deadline to meet. Mainly, I had to pick up my residence permit before I became an illegal resident. Since I missed the normal pickup date I had to travel to Rijswijk, which is a small town (all places in the Netherlands are small) near the Hague. I had been planning the trip -- a desertion of my studies for the day -- for some time. It was only 9am when I woke up, since the governments work on some unknown schedule.

I travelled through time and space to the station, where I bought my ticket. I sat in my seat on the train like a half eaten potato and waited for it to arrive. I waited longer at the Immigration office with my numbered ticket in hand. Some little kids, from someone who had also just immigrated, were providing comical relief.

When that ordeal was done and I got back to Leiden, I had the unpleasant surprise that my bike was stolen. Actually, that comes later. First, I went to the bank, where my yet remaining patience was entirely drained, to present my newly obtained residence permit to them so that my account would stay active. I then went to the grocery store, because I had no food at home. Never shop hungry. But, since I hadn't eaten much yet that day I chose to overload myself with heavy food items.

It was then as I came out of the food library that I noticed my bike was missing. Me and some random woman were both missing our bikes. Thus, I walked home in a light drizzle. I didn't study much that day.

I found through much searching that the town had confiscated my bike because it's tire was sticking over the white line where bikes are allowed to park. As outrageous as this crime is, when I found my bike missing there was a bike parked exactly where my bike used to be. The town steals bikes, and sells them back to owners for nearly 1/3 the bike's value!

The next morning I arranged a ride downtown on back of a friend's bike. Well that didn't work, because their tire popped, and I had to walk the rest of the 6km in a down pour.

Well I have Adventure Lady back, my friend's tire is flat, and I missed nearly two days of research. Good score Karma!

Parents Visited

They liked it I think.

It was a treat to have them visit. I got to show them the town I study the universe from. They had time to do their own exploring, and they went on a canal cruise, and saw stuff that I still have to see.

There wasn't enough time to do all the thing I wanted to do with them, but I don't mind. The doing of things isn't important. I was just happy to see them.

We did get to visit some bars, the market, some restaurants, parts of the city, and they bought me groceries.

Good times.

A bar where me and my dad tasted some good peaty, smokey scotch.

Weather

Birds like it.

A small lake has opened up behind my house. It rains here often. The wind can also be horrendous. They would be classified as a hurricane sometimes if the storms originated in tropical waters, but by meteorological definition they originate in the north Atlantic. There was a flash hail the other day. I was about to go for a walk because it was beautiful out, but then it started raining ice bullets.