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Discovery of Carbon Radio Recombination Lines in absorption towards Cygnus A
© J.B.R. Oonk A study led by ASTRON astronomer J.B.R. Oonk has presented the first detection of Carbon radio recombination lines along the line of sight to Cygnus A. The detection of these very weak...
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In memoriam: Peter Fridman (1940-2014)
© A. Needham One of the side-effects of the demise of the Soviet Union was that many talented scientists found their way to knowledge-institutes in the West. ASTRON and JIVE have been fortunate in...
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Visit from Hoogeschool Windesheim
© Madroon Community Consultants (MCC) On January 9th, a group of students and teachers from Hoogeschool Windesheim (Zwolle) visited ASTRON. The group consisted of first and second year students...
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Tracking tied-array beam wobble
© W. Frieswijk LOFAR's many-beam tied-array mode is not only great for surveys, but also very useful for mapping the array beam shape using pulsars. This movie shows such an experiment, in which 169...
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The power of wimpy radio sources
© Kristina Nyland, ApJ In recent years, a lot of interest and observing time has been devoted to the study of gas outflows generated by active galactic nuclei (AGN). These outflows are thought to have...
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UvA 2nd year research practicum
© JWTH/ASTRON As in past years, from Jan 14-16th, 2014, the ASTRON Astronomy Group hosted four 2nd year undergraduate students from the University of Amsterdam. The students visited ASTRON as part of a...
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A First for LFAA
© Andre van Es On Thursday January 23rd 2014 the Aperture Array Design Consortium (AADC), designing the Low Frequency Aperture Array element in SKA phase 1 was the first to have the MoU with SKA...
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What does the presence of grating lobes do to your effective area - part I
© ASTRON The application of sparse regular arrays raises the question whether the presence of grating lobes reduces the effective area of the array in the scan direction. We have investigated this...
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StefStefCal edging into the Mainstream
© Madroon Community Consultants (MCC) During the 70's, Hans van Someren Greve used a simple but effective technique to calibrate the WSRT antenna phases on a bright point source, prior to a 12-hour...
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Supernova 2014J in M82
© Albert van Duin On January 21st, a type Ia supernova was discovered in M82, by a group of astronomy students from London during an introductory demonstration of how to use the CCD camera on one of...
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Winter Wildlife in the LOFAR Core
© ASTRON The present Dutch winter is very mild, without any snow or skateable ice. As a result, many geese have chosen the LOFAR core area to waggle around and feed on the nice green grass. In...
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Crippled by unenlightened Nature
© n.v.t. Business trips are not always without risk. Especially when the pristine Nature around ASTROJIVE decides to strike back. We really should explain to the various non-human species that we are...
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What does the presence of grating lobes do to your effective area - part II
© ASTRON On January 29th we showed a picture of the array pattern of a 20x20 uniform rectangular array with isotropic elements (see http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20140129 ). We showed...
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Today's Colloquium: Searching for protoclusters in the far-infrared with...
© Emma Rigby Protoclusters, the high-redshift ancestors of local galaxy clusters, are powerful laboratories for tracing the emergence of large-scale structure, and studying the evolution of galaxies in...
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Low Noise Tile
© copyright ASTRON The Low Noise Tile (LNT) aims to demonstrate state-of-the-art noise performance of aperture arrays for the Mid Frequency Aperture Array (MFAA) of the SKA. An earlier AJDI of December...
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Storm-damaged HBA tile in transit
© ASTRON Building a cutting-edge radio telescope is one thing, but operating it offers many unexpected challenges. One of the spare LOFAR HBA antenna tiles was severely damaged by the storms of...
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First Results from the APERTIF ALPHA-3 Correlator
© ASTRON ALPHA-3 is the final prototyping stage of APERTIF. It involves 3 WSRT dishes equiped with Phased Array Feeds (PAF) and a small-scale correlator, a.k.a. "QDR" (Quick and Dirty correlator) or...
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Extra Colloquium Today: The Virtual Observatory and Why It Matters To You
© Markus Demleitner In the most technical words, the Virtual Observatory (VO) is an effort to enable uniform and efficient access to astronomical data. With more glitz, it is like the Web and Google,...
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Today's Colloquium: The Use of the Moon as a Particle Detector
© Justin Bray The ultra-high-energy end of the spectrum of cosmic rays is critical for understanding the nature and origin of these particles. However, the low flux of cosmic rays at these energies...
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Cobalt sees a Pulsar
© (c) Astron 2014 As of the end of March, the loyal IBM BlueGene/P will no longer be LOFAR's digital back-end. It will be replaced by Cobalt, a cluster of 8 PCs (background image) with four NVIDIA...
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