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 […]

Just checked my final grade on Statistical Physics and Thermodynamics 2, an exam I did just before Christmas. And as expected, I got a 6.5/10. Now I still have an oral exam on Star Formation later this month and a written exam Statistical Physics and Thermodynamics 1 on February 7th. If I pass both, I […]

I expected to get a 7 or a 7.5 on 10 for my exam Radiative Processes and I just heard my grade turned out to be a 7, so I’m happy :). I completely screwed up question 1, which cost me about 1.5 points, but question 7 was not taken into account as the question […]

Waaah! Just got back from my oral exam about Astronomical Observation Techniques (yes, on a Saturday). And guess what? Got a 9.5/10 for it!
More about this later ;)

Yes people, it happened ;). A little over a week ago, I got a desk at university. So from now on instead of having to work in busy public halls or computer rooms or having to study at home, I can work and study at my own desk at university.
It’s actually not really my own […]

A few weeks ago I bought two cans of Red Bull. The reason was that we have a course in Stellar Structure and Evolution and I get sooooooooo sleepy in there. The guy teaching it has a very quiet voice, very monotonous, and the classes consist of a Power-Point presentation of 2.5 hours in a […]

Well well… It looks like it’s going to happen in a few weeks… Quicky’s gonna have his own desk at university :P. Me and Wouter (my Bachelor Project partner) made the final decision on our Bachelor’s project earlier this week. As expected, we’re going to do our project under the supervision of Ignas Snellen, our […]

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. […]

Yesterday we had a very short second meeting about our Bachelor’s Research Project. There’s nothing much that has changed yet, so it only took a few minutes. In the next weeks our supervisor is going to make a website and list some research projects that are available at several staff members.
Me and Wouter (my partner […]

As expected, I passed my exam of Quantum Mechanics 2 :). I had expected to get a 7/10, and I got a 7.5 for it ;). So the summer did pay off for me… 7/10 for Stars and 7.5/10 for QM2. I’m happy ;).
I also had a talk with my study advisor (not Paul van […]

God, I hate modems… We’ve been having trouble with internet for the past two days now… The DSL connection seems to be fine, but every time I reboot the modem, we can only access the internet for one minute or so… if we’re lucky…
After four calls to my ISP, they’re now going to send a […]

Today was Science Day at University. Fourteen faculty members of the astronomy department (also called the ‘Sterrewacht’) did a 20-minute talk about what they are doing at the moment. Purpose of the whole day is to get to know the other staffmembers better and to provide the 3rd year students with a better perspective on […]

Well well… I didn’t expect this… My teacher of Astronomy Lab, asked me a favour… He asked me if I could do a 30-minute talk on October 29th for the Study Festival in Leiden about our trip to La Palma and my research project that went so well afterwards.
The Study Festival apparently is a semi-yearly […]

My god… I’m soooooooooo happy! I haven’t felt like this in a looooooooong time.
First of all, my exam went pretty well, I think I should have a 6.5/10, so I’m giving myself an 80% shot of having passed the exam, which means that until the grades are available I’m assuming that I passed :).
But what […]

I got an email from my teacher this afternoon mentioning that he gave me a 9.5/10 for the paper I wrote for my research project :D. I had secretely been hoping on a 9, but a 9.5 was quite unexpected :P. It took me a hell of a lot of work, but in the end […]

Good news :)… I passed my exam ;). Got a 7/10 for it. He said my ’spot’ knowledge was much better now, but my ‘broad’ insight wasn’t as it should be yet. But combined he apparently considered it well enough for a 7 :).
So… One exam to go on Thursday and if I pass that […]

Well guys… Keep your fingers crossed… In three hours, I’m doing my oral exam about Stars. A week ago I was confident I could pass it, and part of me is still confident that I can pass it, but the fact that I haven’t passed any oral exams yet in the Netherlands just keeps crossing […]

Two days ago (well, more like yesterday) the race started for my next two exams :). I’m going to redo Stars and Quantum Mechanics 2 this month. Stars probably around August 15th, Quantum Mechanics 2 on August 25th.
So I have the Cracottes (see picture) and the Ice-Tea ready, my room is cleaned up and I […]

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…). […]

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 […]

Well… What can I say? I studied about 50 hours for this, but it wasn’t enough. Firstly I didn’t study the last 2 chapters, which was fine actually since I could have made it if I knew the other chapters well enough.
However, what our teacher told us in the beginning turned out to be right. […]

**sigh**… bah… don’t know what to do… I think I overworked myself the last five days and especially yesterday. I studied on average more than 7 hours every day the last five days and yesterday I even managed 9 hours. But today…
**sigh** I can’t force myself to do anything but mindless reading of my Quantum […]

Good news, fellah’s :). Annemarie came home with some great news today. I got an eight (on 10, duh) for my exam Galaxies from the end of May. So that was very nice to hear.
I’m now studying for my exam Quantum Mechanics 2 from next Thursday. It’s going pretty well, but I’m quite regularly stuck […]

Yipieeeeeeeee!!! The poster for our research project is finished!
After a talk with our supervisor last Monday we decided not to do any photometry, so we stuck with the astrometry, and that was a wise decision I think. Now we could fully focus on the poster and make it something worthy and it’s also buying us […]

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 […]

I just received the result of Project 3 of my class Astromonical Practicum 2 (SP2). I got a 7.5/10 for it. I got an 8/10 for Project 2 and I passed Project 1 (the only possible results for Project 1 were ‘passed’ or ‘not passed’).
Bearing the weights in mind of each of the project […]

I was just looking online for more info about the cops at university this evening I wrote about in my last post Suspiciously Many Cops… And I found the cause in this article on a news site about Leiden: Studente verkracht in Gorlaeus Lab :|…
At 5.10pm a 30-year old female student was raped in one […]

Hmm… When I went home today at 6.30pm from university, I passed by the Gorlaeus Laboratory, and there were five police cars there… Some cops were standing outside the building talking with people. And there were quite some more people than there usually are at this time of the year… And to my astonishment… When […]

My goodness… I’ve never been at university this long… It’s 8pm now and I’m still here :|… I came to uni around noon, started working at 1pm, went to a colloquium about the OWL (OverWhelmingly Large telescope, 100 meter diameter) at 4pm and continued working at 5pm till now, and I’m still busy :P.
If you […]

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 […]

For those that are wondering why I came up with these restrictions on my blog, here are the why’s…
My mother and my father had a meeting this week with my father’s lawyer to discuss my progress at university. As you might have read earlier in my blog, my father started a legal procedure to escape […]

Hehe, good news peeps ;)… I’m giving myself a 75% shot that I passed my exam today :). It was about Galaxies and Cosmology. I wasn’t really confident, because the book we had to use was a Masters book and was really tough to read. And I also missed the last 3 classes because I […]

Although waking up early works really well for me, today wasn’t going superb. Partly because my computer crashed this morning when I was checking on the times of Formula 1 for today. Blue Screen of Death, registry gone, so I had to recover the registry and all… Took me only 33 minutes to fix it, […]

I woke up this morning at 5.20 am. That’s when I had told my alarm to go off. It took me about 40 minutes to actually get out of bed though :|. You’re probably wondering why on Earth I would get up this early. Well… I study much better when I wake up early. You […]

A small update on the progress of our Near Earth Asteroids Research Project (NEARP) **laughs**.
Annemarie has finished reducing all the data. So of all the pictures (about a 100 or so?) the bias (CCD read-out noise) has been subtracted and they all have been corrected with flat fields (CCD chip sensitivity).
Our next goal is to […]

I just installed a program on my computer yesterday called ‘PowerOff‘. With this program you can shut down, hibernate, log off, power off,… your computer immediately or on a scheduled time etc. I configured it yesterday to shut down after 15 minutes when I went to bed. I had put on some Philip Glass music […]

My father started a legal procedure against me and my mom in order to get passed his obligation to pay his share of my study costs and force me to invest in my studies myself. The reason he’s giving is that I don’t fit the normal behaviour of a student and am neglecting my study.
Obviously […]

I’m back peeps ;). After seven days of observing in La Palma and gathering more than 100 Gigabytes of data with the bunch of us, we headed back home. It was a great, fun, educative and unique experience and I’m soooooo glad I went :).
Anyway… I now have 8 rolls of 36 pictures (about 280 […]

Well, it’s been a while since my last post. Mainly because I had little time in the last few days of my holiday in New York and certainly not when I was packing for La Palma :). I’ll be trying to fill in the gaps either here in La Palma (unlikely) or next week.
We departed […]

This morning I woke up around 8.45 am. We had planned to go to the American Museum of Natural History at 10.30 am, so I had some time to do other stuff beforehand. So I thought I’d check it out whether there were any new asteroids already since the last time I checked last week… […]

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 […]

Some of you will have noticed my latest topic on S3D stating that I’m going to stay away from S3D until April 29th, since I’ll need all the time I’ve got to be prepared when I go to New York and La Palma in April.
Hereby I confirm this on my blog, so that the people […]

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 […]

I spoke with my housemate when we were riding home after having worked on a project for Astronomical Practicum for 6 hours. And… the thing is… Because I lacked discipline last year, I started lagging behind, and because I’m lagging behind, it’s demotivating, and because it’s demotivating, I can’t get myself to work, and because […]

What to do when your life seems like a chain of disappointments, only rarely broken by something good?
What to do when you lost the purpose in your life?
What to do when the things you’ve always dreamed of, don’t motivate you anymore?
What to do when you know you’ve got the talent to do something, but for […]

Phew… it was a hard day today… I had been on the phone a bit too long yesterday with a friend, and I had to get up early this morning, so I wasn’t in the best state of mind. From 9 am till 11 am classes ‘Galaxies’, which was pretty interesting today, about force fields, […]

I just got some very good news from my housemate who had been at university today. She just knocked on my door, to tell me the good news that I had passed my exam from last Monday with a 6 :D. So, unlike what I expected, I did pass, so I won’t have to redo […]

I skipped the Radiative Processes exam last Friday :(. After my exam Electromagnetism 2, I had - due to my own delaying - only three days to study on it, while I certainly needed about 8 - 10, since it’s a difficult subject, partly going further with what we were thaught in Quantum Mechanics and […]

I had an exam today… Electromagnetism 2. It sounds disgusting, and it is disgusting :P. The good news is that I think I’ve raised my grade by one point compared to the last time I did this exam. The bad news is that that is still not enough to pass :(. The first time I […]