© Gemma Janssen
AstroFest is a day-long version of the regular Wednesday AstroLunches, where our ASTRON and JIVE astronomers present ongoing work to each other. Since there are more astronomers than talk slots, the selection of presenters at AstroFest is made through a random draw (lottery) procedure.
This year AstroFest was hosted by Het Postkantoor in Hoogeveen. Since their meeting room is shared with Vue Cinemas, the lucky presenters found their images and work shown on a cinema-sized screen!
We enjoyed 17 talks, on varying topics from Apertif to LOFAR, from FRBs to GRBs, from local space weather to interactions of galaxies.
As AstroFest is also meant to get to know each other better, during the end-of-day borrel there was a quiz which had people debating the answers to questions like "Who lives furthest away from ASTRON/JIVE?", "Who speaks the most languages?" and finding out colleagues' hobbies and favourite foods. As shown in the pictures, the quiz was almost taken more seriously than presenting our daily work.
One quiz-question was most important: "Who gave the best talk and why?". Unanimously, Richard Fallows was chosen for his "Entertaining, Informative, Charismatic CME dance" presentation. Congratulations!