ASTRON/JIVE summer students visit WSRT and LOFAR

© Cees Bassa

On July 18, the ASTRON/JIVE summer students visited the WSRT and LOFAR telescopes. They were joined by the Leiden/ESA Astrophysics Program for Summer Students (LEAPS), with whom they visited ESA/ESTEC, as well as most of the ASTRON/JIVE summer visitors.

Roy Smits and I gave the WSRT tours, showing the telescopes and the new APERTIF, as well as the old MFFE, frontends. We also visited the (very warm) EMBRACE hall and enjoyed a nice lunch in the WSRT canteen. At the LOFAR superterp we were hosted by Richard Fallows, who expertly explained the LOFAR antennas, the station hardware and the correlator/beamformer. The summer students even fixed one of the LBA dipoles (ID LBA 24551-00084), which had fallen over.

The ASTRON/JIVE summer students will present their research at Wednesday astro lunch. Today, Xiaoxi Song and Anoj Khadka will give a lunchtalk, followed by Aarthi Ramesh, Anjali Piette and Floor Broekgaarden, who will present their work next week (August 24). Finally, Yuping Huang will give a lunch talk on September 7. You are welcome to attend these talks. Each student will also post a daily image here in the near future.