Well well… It’s been ages since I actually posted something about my life here. So I think it’s about time that I update all of you guys that are actually interested in me, and not just getting linked here through Google Images :).
So… as the post title says, I’d like to update you on my […]

Along with 26 other students from 22 different countries, I’ve been selected to participate in the Vatican Observatory Summer School in June! Yippiee!!
“The What?”, you’re probably wondering… Well, the Vatican Observatory Summer School is a summer school on observational astronomy and astrophysics held every two years at the Vatican Observatory which is located at the […]

Well… As I said quite some time ago here, I had to do a presentation today for people that might want to study astronomy next year. My supervisor (Ignas) asked me to do a presentation about our trip to La Palma and my research project afterwards.
So I made a Power-Point presentation of about 26 slides. […]

For those that are up for a little challenge… I put the paper of my research project that I finished a few days ago online. It took me a while to convert it to .pdf but I managed finally :). It’s about 13 pages (excluding the references and appendices which aren’t that fun to read…). […]

Last night I had been doing a final spell check on my paper while I was sitting in my bed. Took me about fifty minutes until I almost fell asleep…
And guess what… This morning I woke up dreaming about my two professors, about a new research project, about asteroids breaking up when they get close […]

Good news once more…
The paper I had to write for my research project is finally finished. It took almost two weeks to write since I only had a few hours a day to work on it before I went to work. The last few days it was a little crazy since I worked 9 hours […]

Long time since my last post, I know. But I’ve been very busy :). In the morning from 9 am till noon I’ve been doing mental labor on the paper for my research project, while from 2 pm till 11 pm I’ve been doing physical labor in the chocolate factory ;). I’ll tell you more […]

This morning around 6 a.m. Universal Time a 4 billion-year-old Comet, Tempel-1, was shot in the side with a 40.0-caliber probe missile during an argument, according to a prepared statement from the Asteroid-Belt County West Sheriff’s Department.
Sheriff’s deputies at 6:23 a.m. responded to a reported assault in Asteroid Belt County West, where an argument between […]

We’re virtually done with the astrometry on the asteroid 2005HN3. The poster of our research project has to be finished on Wednesday though, so we’re going to have to rush to be able to finish the photometry. I’m going to talk to my supervisor first thing in the morning to ask for his opinion as […]

What I’m working on at the moment for my Research Project with Annemarie is astrometry. This means we’re trying to determing where exactly our asteroid was on the sky at the time of the observation.
To do this we need to determine which stars on our pictures are which stars in the online databases and using […]

Sometime this weekend I added a new little feature to my site: a ‘Comment Activity‘ picture. You can see it under the Recent Comments section on the left. It shows the comment activity on the last 20 posts I think. If it’s going up and down a lot, it means there’s a lot of activity. […]

A few days ago I went to a series of lectures at my university. One about the history of the relation between science and society, one about bioinformatics, and another one about dark matter and dark energy. All pretty interesting I must say, but the dark matter/dark energy one of course interested me most.
[SOAPBOX]
The guy […]

This afternoon I worked together with Annemarie on the third project for Astronomical Practicum. This project is about the galaxy M87 and its supermassive black hole (SMBH). The information we have are line of sight velocities of gas near the core of M87. And out of that we can calculate the mass of the black […]

Now that was a nice day! Two weeks ago it had been -20ºC (-4ºF) in some parts of the Netherlands, now the temperature went over +20ºC (+68ºF)! A difference of 40ºC (72ºF)… that’s the biggest difference for temperatures in March in the Dutch history. I didn’t profit of the good weather too much though.
I had […]

Well… it was a crazy day today, concerning time managment :P.
I stayed up last night till 1.30 am, then I went to bed and put my alarm clock on 3.45 am to watch Formula 1 from 4 am till 6 am (in which Schumacher made a stupid mistake costing him the race, grrrrrrrr). Then I […]

Some of you might know already, but from April 20th till April 27th, I’ll be in La Palma on the Canary Islands to do some real observing with the 2.5 meter Isaac Newton Telescope. Because of the full moon, we got 6 observing nights for a respectable price, which we can use for our research […]

Here’s a picture of Cassiopeia that I took this summer in Germany. I had taken about 7 pictures that night, but all of them were screwed up. I don’t remember why though. I finished the roll only a month ago, so that’s why it took me so long to get this developed. As you can […]