© ASTRON

The Gemini board has a powerful Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA and can perfectly be used as a 100G data packet generator.

More information on Gemini can be found on the following daily images:

http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/index.html?main.php?date=20170501

http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/index.html?main.php?date=20170807

The image shows Gijs and Leon working on the connection of the digital lab to the Gemini board. In the top left, the moment of excitement is captured, when the experiment started to become successful, together with John. Finally, a screenshot of a nano fraction of the received 100G data on the Server in the basement is shown in the bottom right corner on top of an enlargement of the Gemini board. The data was generated and sent by the FPGA on the Gemini board and transported on a link between Gemini and a Server of the DAS-5 compute cluster via a 100 meter single mode optical link.

© Photos: Henri Meulman, Nico Ebbendorf

Witnessed by ILT director Dr. René Vermeulen and the ILT-board members, Professor Peter Gallagher on behalf of the I-LOFAR consortium, together with ILT Board Chair Prof. Philip Best, signed the membership certificate (see picture), confirming that Ireland is the lucky 7th European country to have membership in the International LOFAR telescope!

LOFAR is a multi-national facility, with ASTRON as the coordinating operational entity for the International LOFAR Telescope. It is a Foundation under Dutch law, and has board members from LOFAR consortia in each of the countries where LOFAR stations are located. The telescope consists of 38 stations in the Netherlands, six in Germany, three in Poland, and one in France, Sweden and the UK. In July 2017, IE613, the thirteenth International LOFAR station, was completed on the grounds of Birr Castle in Ireland (see picture below) The data taken by individual LOFAR stations can be locally processed for scientific programmes, and are also transported by fiber links for combined processing in a central super computer hosted at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands: the ILT is now an aperture synthesis telescope network which spans over 2000 km; it is the largest and most powerful low frequency radio telescope in existence.

The I-LOFAR consortium is consisting of following universities and institutes:

Trinity College Dublin, Armagh Observatory, University College Dublin, National University of Ireland - Galway, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin City Univerisity, Athlone Institute of Technology and University College Cork.

The Irish membership of the ILT not only has significantly enlarged the long-baseline capabilities of LOFAR, but also will contribute to new exiting science with this radio telescope!

Pictured here are:

Left picture: Dr René Vermeulen (Director of ILT), Prof. Peter Gallagher (Head of the I-LOFAR Consortium) and Prof. Philip Best (Chair of the ILT Board).
Right picture:

Prof. Dominik Schwarz (DE), Prof. Andrzej Krankowski (PL), Prof. Carole Jackson (ASTRON), Prof. Peter Gallagher (IE), Dr. René Vermeulen (ILT/ASTRON), Prof. Philip Best (UK), Prof. Huub Rottgering (NL), Dr. Marijke Haverkorn (NL).
Picture below, right:

The I-LOFAR station was officially opened on 27th of July by the Irish Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, John Halligan T.D., in the presence of Lord Rosse (who generously made available the land at Birr Castle), I-LOFAR Chair Prof. Peter Gallagher and other representatives of the I-LOFAR consortium, ILT Director René Vermeulen and ASTRON Roll-out manager Nico Ebbendorf, many other well-wishers, and members of the press.
Picture below left: LOFAR station at Birr, Co. Offaly Ireland.

© public

Phil gave an SKA status report to all staff; he mentioned the recent election of Catherine Cesarsky as the new Chair of the SKA Board; he provided an update on the engineering design efforts, and showed photographs of prototype dish hardware, the aperture array verification system in Western Australia, the Band 1 feeds being developed in Sweden, the Band 2 receivers being developed jointly in South Africa and Canada, the prototype Non-Imaging Processing board from the UK and Australia, and the SKA-Low correlator/beamformer board being developed jointly by ASTRON and CSIRO.

He also showed an aerial shot of the new 1.6 MW solar power station at the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory, which is soon to be fully operational. Another aerial photograph showed excellent progress on the construction of the SKA HQ in the shadow of the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in the UK; the building extension will be complete in June 2018.

Phil finished up by telling us about the good progress towards the signing of the Convention (or treaty) that will establish the SKA Observatory, the estimated construction and operations costs for the observatory and the cost control measures that have been implemented and ended with a few words about the overall schedule, which will hopefully see construction activities starting around the end of 2019.

© Jasper Annyas & Auke Klazema

Next to this important step in the LOFAR development, the RO got valuable experience delivering new software, while at the same time doing general support. This will be used in our future projects, as we want to improve and expand on our software deliveries, while at the same time keeping up our support.

© Mercedes Filho

Instead, it has been suggested that most of the XMP characteristics can be explained through cosmological gas accretion.

In this talk I will present the main results on the multi-wavelength study of XMPs: their characteristics and components, the relations with other galaxy populations and possible explanations for their properties.

© Ilse van Bemmel

And, of course none of this would have been possible without a whole team of people involved. From writing to designing, from funding to editing there are a lot of people who have offered their expertise to ensure this project was a success.

On 25th October team leader, Paula Fusiara, brought everyone together to celebrate the completion of 'Astronomie? Zo werkt het!'. She made a masterpiece of a cake, complete with asteroids, multiple layers and A LOT of blue food colouring!

While this celebration may signal the completion of 'Astronomie? Zo werkt het!', it also marks the beginning of 'Astronomy? That's how it works!'. Demand has been high for an English version of the game and work has already begun on translating the cards. Watch this space!

© Jasper Annyas & Auke Klazema

Our versatile telescope now reacts to external triggers, without the need of personnel in the control room and can do this faster than the manual procedure. Some checks are done (f.i. comparing the priority of the trigger to that of the current observation) and if they all comply, the current observation is aborted and the one specified in the trigger is loaded in the scheduler. There you go: LOFAR hunts for another unique event in the sky!

Apart from this important step in the LOFAR development, the RO got valuable experience delivering new software, while at the same time doing general support. This will be used in our future projects, as we want to improve and expand on our software deliveries, while at the same time keeping up our support.

© @Astron

ASTRON is one of the two partners involved in this project challenging project, together with University of Manchester (UMAN).

From 25th to the 29th of September the RF course was given in Ventpils to a group of students and staff of the Augstkola in Ventspils. The participants have been educated in all the technical aspects of RF front-ends to be able to receive the radio signals from space.

The course was divided in four separate parts: RF-basics, RF-systems, Antennas and Hands-on experience. After the basic theory was lectured the students had to do exercises to experience radio frequencies in the real world. State of the art measurement equipment was organized by ASTRON to make sure the students will be in tune of the time and well prepared for next generation radio telescope techniques.

The photo's give an impression of the week.

© Photos: Henri Meulman, Nico Ebbendorf

Witnessed by ILT director Dr. René Vermeulen and the ILT-board members, Professor Peter Gallagher on behalf of the I-LOFAR consortium, together with ILT Board Chair Prof. Philip Best, signed the membership certificate (see picture), confirming that Ireland is the lucky 7th European country to have membership in the International LOFAR telescope!

LOFAR is a multi-national facility, with ASTRON as the coordinating operational entity for the International LOFAR Telescope. It is a Foundation under Dutch law, and has board members from LOFAR consortia in each of the countries where LOFAR stations are located. The telescope consists of 38 stations in the Netherlands, six in Germany, three in Poland, and one in France, Sweden and the UK. In July 2017, IE613, the thirteenth International LOFAR station, was completed on the grounds of Birr Castle in Ireland (see picture below) The data taken by individual LOFAR stations can be locally processed for scientific programmes, and are also transported by fiber links for combined processing in a central super computer hosted at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands: the ILT is now an aperture synthesis telescope network which spans over 2000 km; it is the largest and most powerful low frequency radio telescope in existence.

The I-LOFAR consortium is consisting of following universities and institutes:

Trinity College Dublin, Armagh Observatory, University College Dublin, National University of Ireland - Galway, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin City Univerisity, Athlone Institute of Technology and University College Cork.

The Irish membership of the ILT not only has significantly enlarged the long-baseline capabilities of LOFAR, but also will contribute to new exiting science with this radio telescope!

Pictured here are:

Left picture: Dr René Vermeulen (Director of ILT), Prof. Peter Gallagher (Head of the I-LOFAR Consortium) and Prof. Philip Best (Chair of the ILT Board).
Right picture:

Prof. Dominik Schwarz (DE), Prof. Andrzej Krankowski (PL), Prof. Carole Jackson (ASTRON), Prof. Peter Gallagher (IE), Dr. René Vermeulen (ILT/ASTRON), Prof. Philip Best (UK), Prof. Huub Rottgering (NL), Dr. Marijke Haverkorn (NL).
Picture below, right:

The I-LOFAR station was officially opened on 27th of July by the Irish Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, John Halligan T.D., in the presence of Lord Rosse (who generously made available the land at Birr Castle), I-LOFAR Chair Prof. Peter Gallagher and other representatives of the I-LOFAR consortium, ILT Director René Vermeulen and ASTRON Roll-out manager Nico Ebbendorf, many other well-wishers, and members of the press.
Picture below left: LOFAR station at Birr, Co. Offaly Ireland.

© Photo: Thomas Jurges

I guess one could call this a lucky shot but sometimes nature has other plans. Not only did I get the telescope nicely centred against the Drenthe's summer sky, a swallow decided to have the leading part in the photo. It managed to be right in the middle above the dish in full flight. Nature never stops to surprise me.

© Photos: Henri Meulman, Nico Ebbendorf

Witnessed by ILT director Dr. René Vermeulen and the ILT-board members, Professor Peter Gallagher on behalf of the I-LOFAR consortium, together with ILT Board Chair Prof. Philip Best, signed the membership certificate (see picture), confirming that Ireland is the lucky 7th European country to have membership in the International LOFAR telescope!

LOFAR is a multi-national facility, with ASTRON as the coordinating operational entity for the International LOFAR Telescope. It is a Foundation under Dutch law, and has board members from LOFAR consortia in each of the countries where LOFAR stations are located. The telescope consists of 38 stations in the Netherlands, six in Germany, three in Poland, and one in France, Sweden and the UK. In July 2017, IE613, the thirteenth International LOFAR station, was completed on the grounds of Birr Castle in Ireland (see picture below) The data taken by individual LOFAR stations can be locally processed for scientific programmes, and are also transported by fiber links for combined processing in a central super computer hosted at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands: the ILT is now an aperture synthesis telescope network which spans over 2000 km; it is the largest and most powerful low frequency radio telescope in existence.

The I-LOFAR consortium is consisting of following universities and institutes:

Trinity College Dublin, Armagh Observatory, University College Dublin, National University of Ireland - Galway, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin City Univerisity, Athlone Institute of Technology and University College Cork.

The Irish membership of the ILT not only has significantly enlarged the long-baseline capabilities of LOFAR, but also will contribute to new exiting science with this radio telescope!

Pictured here are:

Left picture: Dr René Vermeulen (Director of ILT), Prof. Peter Gallagher (Head of the I-LOFAR Consortium) and Prof. Philip Best (Chair of the ILT Board).
Right picture:

Prof. Dominik Schwarz (DE), Prof. Andrzej Krankowski (PL), Prof. Carole Jackson (ASTRON), Prof. Peter Gallagher (IE), Dr. René Vermeulen (ILT/ASTRON), Prof. Philip Best (UK), Prof. Huub Rottgering (NL), Dr. Marijke Haverkorn (NL).
Picture below, right:

The I-LOFAR station was officially opened on 27th of July by the Irish Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, John Halligan T.D., in the presence of Lord Rosse (who generously made available the land at Birr Castle), I-LOFAR Chair Prof. Peter Gallagher and other representatives of the I-LOFAR consortium, ILT Director René Vermeulen and ASTRON Roll-out manager Nico Ebbendorf, many other well-wishers, and members of the press.
Picture below left: LOFAR station at Birr, Co. Offaly Ireland.

© Photo: Thomas Jurges

I guess one could call this a lucky shot but sometimes nature has other plans. Not only did I get the telescope nicely centred against the Drenthe's summer sky, a swallow decided to have the leading part in the photo. It managed to be right in the middle above the dish in full flight. Nature never stops to surprise me.

© @Astron

ASTRON is one of the two partners involved in this project challenging project, together with University of Manchester (UMAN).

From 25th to the 29th of September the RF course was given in Ventpils to a group of students and staff of the Augstkola in Ventspils. The participants have been educated in all the technical aspects of RF front-ends to be able to receive the radio signals from space.

The course was divided in four separate parts: RF-basics, RF-systems, Antennas and Hands-on experience. After the basic theory was lectured the students had to do exercises to experience radio frequencies in the real world. State of the art measurement equipment was organized by ASTRON to make sure the students will be in tune of the time and well prepared for next generation radio telescope techniques.

The photo's give an impression of the week.

© NOVA Optical Infrared instrumentation group

Being an instrument that is designed to combine coherently the light of the four telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), MATISSE is able of emulating the aperture of a 200-m telescope, resulting in spatial resolutions up to 5 milliarcsec in the 2.8-5 and 8-13 micrometer wavelength bands. MATISSE is an imager and also a spectrograph with resolutions between 30 and 5000. With these characteristics MATISSE is extremely well suited for the study of Young Stellar Objects (YSOs), Active galactic nuclei (AGNs), asymptotic giant branch stars (AGBs) and planetary nebulae and extra-solar planets.

In MATISSE the light of the 4 telescopes is imaged on a detector where interference patterns are observed, from which the original image can be reconstructed. Interferometry at optical and near-infrared wavelength is extremely difficult but the verifications showed that the instrument in the lab works as expected. The NOVA Optical and Infrared Instrumentation group at ASTRON designed and built the two Cold Optical Benches, which combine at cryogenic temperatures the beams of the telescopes onto the detectors.

With the arrival of the instrument on the observing grounds, the next activity is assembly of the instrument at the interferometric laboratory of the observatory. First light is expected early 2018.

© Colloquium / public use

X-ray binaries are ideal systems to study this relationship, as they evolve through outburst on humanly observable timescales. During such outburst, their luminosities increase by several orders of magnitude, with the thermal X-ray emission from the accretion disk and the radio emission from the relativistic jets undergoing dramatic, coupled changes.

I will present the results of a multiwavelength radio through to X-ray observing campaign of a Galactic black hole X-ray binary and discuss why these campaigns are critical to understand the processes that are occurring around a black hole X-ray binary.

In the image we see the contemporaneous evolution of the accretion inflow and the jet outflow, highlighting that time-resolved, multiwavelength observation are critical to the understanding these objects.

© Stefan Wijnholds

This plot shows a comparison between the gain phase solutions obtained for a few antennas of the LOFAR CS002 LBA outer station by standard calibration procedures using a source model (solid curves) and by blind calibration using a sparsity constraint (dots). The results agree very well! The slightly larger spread in the blind calibration solutions can be explained by rounding the actual source positions of Cas A and Cyg A to image grid points in the alignment step needed to resolve the phase / source position ambiguity in blind calibration.

An interesting result from the literature on sparse reconstruction is that, if the source model is identifiable, the estimation accuracy for image reconstruction is identical to that of the socalled oracle estimator. This non-existing estimator knows, a priori, where the sources are. This implies that, if the apparent calibration source fluxes need to be estimated, for example due to unknown direction dependent effects common to all receivers, the calibration accuracy of blind calibration is identical to that of regular self-calibration! This is one of the key insights gained from this blind calibration study, whose details are discussed in a recent MNRAS paper by Simone Chiarucci and Stefan Wijnholds.

© Astron

One of the principal aims of Apertif is to survey very large regions of the sky to detect the atomic hydrogen in galaxies in order to find many many galaxies of all types and sizes, and to use this information to learn more about galaxy structure and evolution. In order to test the readiness of Apertif for such wide-field hydrogen observations, an observation was done pointing at a nearby group of galaxies, the group around the galaxy NGC 5033. This group has been studied with the old WSRT several times before, so a direct comparison between Apertif and the WSRT can be made.

The movie loops through a small selection of frequency channels of the observing band, and shows the central 2 x 1.5 degree region of the full 3 x 3 degree field of view of the observation. Many images are empty (i.e. the wavy ocean blue), but in several channels, at several locations, hydrogen from a number of galaxies is detected (the red-white spots). The movie is the result of a single night of Apertif observing. With the old WSRT it would take about two weeks to cover the same field. All data were automatically calibrated and reduced with the Apertif pipelines.

There are two reasons why the signal from the hydrogen from different galaxies is detected at different frequencies; and that also within a galaxy, the emission is spread over many frequency channels. One reason is the fact that the Universe is expanding. This means that while radiation is travelling from a galaxy to the telescope, the waves are stretched along the way, increasing the wavelength and thus lowering the frequency of the wave. The more distant a galaxy, the more the frequency changes.

The second reason is that within a galaxy, gas from one part of a galaxy moves with respect to gas from other parts, for example because the gas reservoir in the galaxy rotates around its centre. Because of the Doppler effect, the radio waves from these different regions are detected at slightly different frequencies. These shifts are on top of those due to the Universal expansion. From these 'internal' shifts, one can derive how the gas moves in a galaxy, which tells a lot about the galaxy's internal structure.

The movie covers only about 1/3 of the full field of view and only a small fraction of the final Apertif frequency band (4 MHz out of 300 MHz). Nevertheless, already 9 objects are detected (one of which is a cloud floating in between galaxies). So this observation demonstrates that each single, full Apertif observation will uncover the hydrogen in a few hundred galaxies. We plan to do more than a thousand of such observations, so we can be looking forward to detect about half a million galaxies...

© ASTRON

The yellow box is the generator and it contains a Volvo engine that drives an alternator to generate up to 500 kVA or 400 kW. The QAS 500 is the second largest generator in that range and it weighs about 5500 kg, so it is quite a device. The grey box next to it contains the diesel fuel. At maximum load the generator takes about 100 litres/hour. For comparison, that is about as much as 10 cars. The generator powered our building and remarkably also an electrical car that was charging during the day. On average the generator used 1200 litres of diesel per day, so about 50 litres per hour.

Last weekend, the ASTRON site was successfully reconnected to the power grid. In the meantime, this generator has provided an appropriate and technically interesting solution. Many thanks to the BHV, and the general affairs and ICT departments for handling this entire incident so well.

© ASTRON

Unfortunately, not all jubilees will be able to attend but we wish everyone having a work anniversary in 2017 a happy jubilee day with many more years to come.

© LOFAR Surveys Key Science Project