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.