ASTRON at Alles Kids Festival in Emmen

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On 17 and 18 June we were a guest at the annual Alles Kids Festival in Emmen, by invitation of the NWA. Part of our invitation was that we were allowed to develop a new set-up for our Open Science Hub, which we debuted at the festival. The set-up, called ‘Looking at Invisible Light’ explains to children that most light waves are actually invisible, but that there are ways to make them visible (such as we do with telescopes) and show us all new kinds of things.

We also brought the ‘miniature’ radio telescope with us, as well as our Black Hole experiment and the crafting sets for building your own pulsar.

We had a blast being at the festival and that wouldn’t have been possible without the help of a lot of our colleagues. Sjouke Kuindersma, Scott Polotto, Tammo Jan Dijkema, and Fanna Lautenbach really came through in getting the new set-up ready (enough) on time; Martijn Tilma, Denis Schrama, and several others of the facilities department were instrumental in helping out with the logistics; the IT department managed to get our extra monitor for us on time and arranged a few laptops for us, even though we required one that didn’t have a standard set-up; Michel Arts, Michiel Brentjens, Tammo Jan Dijkema, and Marco de Vos were crucial in exciting the young minds of the children that visited us, and I personally would also like to thank my colleagues Elise Brouwer and Frank Nuijens for helping out. And last, but definitely not least, our thanks go out to RUG’s astronomy students Maria Dziouba and Lotte Bartels, who helped us out in many ways.

Without all of those people and their efforts this festival would not nearly have been the success that it was. We hope that we have made some children wonder about the universe and all of the secrets it still holds for us, but most importantly: we hope those children had fun!