Telescopes tour

Logistics and touringcar departure times

Date: Thursday 10 October 2019
Time: 13:30-19:30 hrs. Departure time touringcar bus: 13:30 hrs from MartiniPlaza.
Radio telescopes: WSRT and LOFAR. See below for more information.

See final schedule here.

Transportation by touringcar for all telescope tour participants is arranged. Please be on time since the buses will not wait! Kindly wear your name badge for networking reasons. The badge also contains the ticket for your group during the tour.

The tour will finish with drinks and snacks at a nice café in Exloo, not far from the LOFAR telescope.

Buses will be back in Groningen around 19:15/19:30 hrs. All buses will first go to MartiniPlaza, and afterwards go to Parking ‘Q-park Ossenmarkt’ in the city centre.

Clothes, shoes, your bag(s) during the tour

We advise participants to wear comfortable clothes and (hiking) shoes. Be prepared for wet and/or cold weather! During the LOFAR tour, the grounds can be wet. Click here for weather forecast. Temperatures mentioned here are in degrees Celsius.

You can leave your bag(s) in the touringcar bus when you leave the bus, but note that the LOC cannot take any responsibility or liability in case your belongings get lost.

Radio telescopes WSRT and LOFAR

Participants can join a very interesting telescope tour to two world-class radio telescopes operated by ASTRON on Thursday afternoon 10 October (sessions will end Thursday morning):

WSRT – Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope
and
LOFAR – Low Frequency Array.The WSRT, consisting of 14 25m dish-shaped antennas, is currently being transformed into an efficient 21cm L-band survey facility by the installation of the Apertif system which significantly increases the field of view and thereby the survey speed through the adoption of Phased Array Feeds (PAFs). LOFAR is the world’s largest radio telescope which combines signals from 51 phased array antenna stations distributed in The Netherlands and across Europe. It covers the largely unexplored low-frequency range from 10-240 MHz and provides several unique observing capabilities.

Both WSRT and LOFAR are operated by ASTRON Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Web links with information about the telescopes will follow in a later stage since ASTRON’s new website is under construction.

Participants are requested to register for the telescope tour in case they wish to join. Costs for the telescope are mentioned at the registration page.

Radio Telescope Westerbork

the so-called ‘Super terp’ of the LOFAR telescope (Low Frequency Array)