Everyone doing their Master Applied Physics at the University of Groningen needs to complete an internship at some point. I always planned to do this after finishing my research. However, an interesting project at ASTRON came across and I decided to start with that, which turned out to be perfectly possible. In this blog I will tell something my experiences during this internship.

Let me start by saying that I did not know much about ASTRON before stared this project. I heard the name before, yes, but that was about it. ASTRON is Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and part of the NWO. It should be clear that astronomy is the final goal of the institution, but some common knowledge never hurts: ASTRON operates the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), which some of you may have seen. They also built (and still expand) the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), which consist of several large fields of antennas that measure in the 10-240 MHz band all across Europe. Data from these stations is routed to ASTRON and processed there. They take part in European and also worldwide collaborations. Product of such collaborations is the Very Large Telescope (VLT) facility in Chili and the future Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in South Africa and Australia.

For my internship I worked at the R&D department for three months. The research project was on a new type of coordinate measurement system. However, since it has yet to be commercialized, I shall not discuss it in much detail. Work on this particular project is nowadays mostly performed by interns, so there were no direct colleagues. Fortunately, many people at the department have worked on the topic in the past, so there was a lot of feedback to be gathered. The idea is to just walk into any office to ask questions about your venture. Of course, knowing where you get the right answers goes a long way. In this way I got to work with many people, even though I was the only one officially working the project. The ambiance at ASTRON is quite interesting. I learned that most of the employees have over ten years of experience in the institution, which means that it is a place to stay. This also means that there is a lot of specific knowledge present. For instance, they perform a lot of milling on aluminum to build the measurement equipment they deliver. Therefore, they know how to avoid the common problems at the initial design. Typically, any type of telescope is only built only once, so it has to be perfect. That is why people are looking for the best solution, rather than just any working solution. Finally, lots of people are working together on one project, so there is lots of teamwork to achieve common goals.

I really enjoyed my internship for the reasons above. However, I also need to mention that it might be a little remote and hard to find at first. It is located inside an actual forest near Dwingeloo. The reason for this is the radio telescope they house, which functions best when interfering signals are brought down to minimum. I travelled to work every day by taking the train to Beilen and cycling through the forest to ASTRON. Some may deem it a long trip, being 1.5 hour from home to work, but I found it quite refreshing. Now all that is left is to finish my master research somewhere this year¹.

Footnote 1: [That, and computational physics, but I assume I do not stand alone in that.]