Nederlandse Astronomen Conferentie 2013

© ASTRON

An enthusiastic ASTRON and JIVE delegation has attended the Dutch Astronomy Conference (NAC). This year it was held on May 15-17 in Belgium (Lommel, actually just a few hundred meters from the border) and was organised jointly by the astronomy institutes of KU Leuven and Ghent University. The location, Center Parcs "De Vossemeren", would have been perfect if the weather would have helped a bit more. It was a very wet NAC.

The ASTRON-crew was quite prominent in the program with talks and a number of posters. Results from LOFAR were also presented in a number of talks.

The rain and some particularly challenging talks created a few tough moments, but apart from this, the meeting was very "gezellig", as a NAC should be!

As per tradition, a few prizes were awarded: the ''Willem de Graaffprijs'', for outreach activities, was awarded this year by Stichting De Koepel to Peter Barthel (Groningen); the poster price was awarded to Mina Koleva (U.Ghent) and the ''Pastoor Schmeitsprijs'', for outstanding contributions by a young astronomer, to Rychard Bouwens (Leiden) for his work on high-redshift galaxy evolution.

Next year the NAC will be organised by Leiden (but the year after it could be our turn!)