SKA-LOW Operator Visits ASTRON!

© Riley Keel

Howdy! I’m one of the Telescope Operators for the SKA-LOW, and I visited ASTRON from the 19th of February to the 1st of March. The purpose of this trip was essentially to learn as much from the Operators of LOFAR as possible, in order to inform future SKA-LOW Telescope Operations.

The Telescope Operations team Marco Drost, Jurjen Sluman, Henk Mulder, Richard Blaauw, and Bernard Asabere welcomed me and I felt at home on the team immediately. Thanks to all of you for answering so many questions and showing me how you do things here!

I was also lucky enough to see Westerbork and several LOFAR stations in person - thank you to Lute van de Bult for teaching me about the dishes and dish maintenance, and Ronald Schrik for teaching me about LOFAR maintenance. He even let me change over an LNA, as well as taking almost all of these great photos!

I’d also like to thank Menno Norden for helping me troubleshoot a live issue that popped up during a presentation - the demo effect was in full force, but I had just the right person to help me out.

The experience has been incredible; I have 25+ pages of notes to go over back in Perth, Australia with my team and I really hope I get to come back here someday for us to keep working together in future.