My fifth “first-author” paper is accepted + FWO Postdoctoral Fellowship!

I am happy to report that my latest paper entitled KIC 10526294: a slowly rotating B star with rotationally split, quasi-equally spaced gravity modes is now in press for the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. It contains the results of the work I have done since last summer. If you are an astronomer, or simply have nothing better to do, you should definitely have a look at the non language-edited – but other than that final – version on arxiv.org.

But there are even better news connected to my carrier: I have been granted a 3-year Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Fund for Scientific Research (FWO). In practice this means that I have job security until October 2017, so I can continue producing papers like the one above :) This is probably the greatest news of the summer, since it is not so easy to get such a fellowship; the acceptance rate is only ~25%. (I was the only one from our institute who got it this year.)

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Rule #6 // Free your mind and your legs will follow.

After arriving back to Belgium from Chile, first of all I had to make sure that I can handle the group ride I planned for the coming Sunday (besides adjusting back to the Central European time zone, which was actually not so bad: I woke up at 5:30 on the morning, and had to fight falling asleep at around 8 on the evening for a few days only). Since the decision that I would have to plan and guide the Sunday ride of the 25th of May was already made during the first weeks of the year, I had already planned a great, and quite difficult route before I knew that I would need to go to Chile for three weeks just before the ride in question. So after I arrived home, I had only three days to get my s**t together by strictly following what is written in Rule #5.

When I got back on my bike for the first time, that was really weird. During the first pedal strokes my body was saying: “What is this feeling, what is happening?”, then for 2 kilometres it was like “I am so strong, I am totally invincible, I am barely pedalling and look at me, I am flying!”, which somewhere around kilometre 2.01 turned into heavy breathing, a loss of speed, and the realisation that I am totally out of shape. Yep. Three weeks without any activity (more intense than walking a little bit here and there) had a huge effect on my physical condition. And not a positive one. Anyway, I biked to Mechelen and back (60 km), then on the next day I did a reconnaissance of the ride planned for Sunday, but before arriving to the real climbs, I suddenly felt so tired, that I had to skip the most difficult kilometres. I arrived home dead tired with only 80 km in my legs… Luckily an easy Saturday gave me enough rest, and on Sunday morning I actually felt surprisingly good before the ride. It was a real success, with beautiful sunny weather and lots of participants (~16), despite the elections being held on the same day. You can see the elevation profile of the ride below, with the more significant climbs (summing up to a total elevation gain of ~1000 m) marked.

Although the ride was ‘only’ ~100 km, I did an extra 30 km along the channel towards Mechelen, which meant that I arrived home (again) dead tired… But this extra effort was necessary, as I had a very special entry for the following Sunday in my calendar: Leuven – Knokke – Leuven, a ride spanning over more than 300 kilometres – something I could not participate in last year because I was abroad on a conference somewhere. I have to admit that when back on Friday I had to skip parts of the reconnaissance ride and go home with only 80 kilometres, I was doubting a little bit if I am really in a shape good enough for such an epic day. And with that thought, we arrive to the title of this post.

So here is deal: if you have the fitness level to bike 100 km, you can (in most of the cases) also do 300 km (and even more). Beyond one point, it is not about the physical condition anymore, but the mental approach. The way you prepare psychologically is as important as the kilometres you spend training week-by-week on the road or the trainer. And remember, your mind is your ally but also your worst enemy. Thoughts like ‘what if I can not make it’ should be left home, buried deep in a drawer, because should you encounter them in the saddle, they will break you faster than a long stretch of cobbles would. I think it is important to think about the route (days) before the ride itself, to simply get your mind used to the idea that you will ride 10 hours or 300 kilometres the next day. I find that it is this approach what really makes a huge difference. This also explains why it is much easier to go for a 150 km ride than to go for 100 km, then continue for another extra 50 which was not planned in advance.

And to say something about the ride to Knokke and back: I really enjoyed it, and both the 10.5 hours in the saddle and the distance of 312 kilometres are new personal records for me. We were lucky with the weather, not too cold, not too warm, not too much wind, and not too much sun – ideal. Also, riding with a big group meant that I could save a lot of energy by staying inside the peloton, rolling along at 30 km/h without any effort. I admit that it is not really nice that I did not spend much time in front, but after not biking for three weeks, I just wanted to make sure I survive the day… This resulted in an average heart rate of 133 bpm, which is pretty much the lowest average I ever had on a group ride… It was a really beautiful day on the bike :)

Although right after the ride I felt more or less perfectly fine, the coming days brought some discomfort, meaning that even if I stuffed myself full with food, I felt hungry, but if I ate more, I just felt sick… When this feeling went away I was happy to get back on the bike again.

Free your mind and your legs will follow…

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Good bye La Silla

I am officially done with the observing on La Silla. It was a nice experience, but 17 days in the night rhythm – working, or at least being awake during the night, and sleeping during the day – is really exhausting, so I am happy to go home now. At this moment I am staying at the ESO Guest House, with still two hours to go before I need to leave to the airport. I am already in the process of switching back to European time, which of course means that I slept miserably, and I was awake at completely unreasonable hours during the night… In total I managed to sleep something like 4 hours during the day before leaving La Silla, and another 4 hours during the night, so it is actually better than it feels. If everything goes according to the plan, then I should be home in 24 hours from now. As a good bye from Chile, here are three pictures from last week showing some nice lenticular clouds above the Andes.

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Scenes from La Silla

I am halfway through my observing run here at La Silla (7 nights done, 7 nights to go), and I have a few nice pictures to share, and maybe a few things to tell about life up here. First of all, the La Silla Observatory was the European Southern Observatory’s first large site – operations started here in the 1960s.

From the website of ESO: ” The La Silla Observatory is located at the outskirts of the Chilean Atacama Desert, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile and at an altitude of 2400 metres. Here, ESO operates two of the most productive 4-metre class telescopes in the world. The 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror (active optics), a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world’s current large telescopes. The ESO 3.6-metre telescope is now home to the world’s foremost extrasolar planet hunter: High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a spectrograph with unrivalled precision. The infrastructure of La Silla is also used by many of the ESO Member States for targeted projects such as the Swiss 1.2-metre Leonhard Euler Telescope [I am here], the Rapid Eye Mount telescope (REM) and the TAROT Telescope gamma-ray burst chaser, as well as more common user facilities such as the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre and the Danish 1.54-metre telescopes.”

How does my typical day (or – actually – night) look like? I get up at 15:15, get a shower, then I walk 1 km to the telescope (luckily not so much uphills, so it’s really nothing compared to the walk on La Palma), and start the calibrations (technical preparation of the telescope and the instruments) at around 16:00. I also have to make the schedule for the night: I assemble a list of targets from a few different ongoing observing programs, according to the requests I got beforehand. Then at 17:45-18:00 I walk back down to have dinner. (The food is similar to what you get on La Palma, a bit greasy but fine, lots of meat, fish, pasta, and potatoes. Plus there is always tons of fruits, which I always really missed while observing on the Canaries.) I have to eat a bit quicker than usual, since I need to be back at the telescope by 18:50. When the Sun reaches -12° below the horizon, I start the observations. From here, everything is pretty automatic, but there are many things which need my supervision. E.g., if the weather changes, I have to adapt the settings to ensure that the observations remain useful (in terms of signal-to-noise). The observations can continue until 6:20, when the nautical twilight starts. After stopping with the science program, I might still need to make some calibrations, and shut down the telescope. Then I walk down and have breakfast. By the time I go to sleep it is usually 7:30-8:00…

The autumn weather is all right up here, now it is around 12°C during the day, and 8°C during the night, but a week ago it was 18°C – at night. It can get pretty windy sometimes, yesterday I woke up several times because the wind made so much noise. (We are talking about a 20 m/s average windspeed here.) Since the beginning of my observing run, I had 5 perfectly clear nights, and 2 nights with some partial cloud coverage, but there was not a single night when I could not work at all. The scenery is still beautiful, the colours of the mountains seem to be different every day, thus the view keeps changing continuously. I am trying to limit myself and not take – or at least not publish – hundreds of similar pictures, but it is very difficult to make a good selection. The past two evenings the sky around sunset was really mind-blowing, especially while I was walking down for dinner, without any of the two cameras I have here with me. Typical… Yesterday was especially amazing, with colours from yellow to deep purple all over the sky above the domes. I was really mad at myself for not taking my camera. But since I have to walk back after dinner, already carrying my food for the night (a few slices of cake, one or two bananas, and some water), I am not so willing to take a camera with me as extra weight. 1st world problems…

The only real problem I have (after they finally turned on the heating in the bedrooms, because sleeping in long pants and a sweater was not so great during the first two nights) is the lack of sports. I actually planned to do some running, I even brought my full running gear with me, but I simply have no time to do it. If I want to go for a half-hour run, then I need to get up 45 minutes earlier, which is really not reasonable, when the most sleep I got the past week was 7h 25m. I can only hope that when I am back in Belgium, I will still know how to ride my bike… And especially that I will have the power to do it. We will see :) I am getting a bit homesick and tired, but it is nice to work here.

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The Magellanic Clouds over La Silla

The Milky Way, our home galaxy is not alone in the Local Group of galaxies in the Universe, there are several smaller or larger satellite galaxies orbiting around it. Two of these are visible to the unaided eye, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (the LMC and the SMC). These are both irregular galaxies, both only visible from the Southern hemisphere.

First, here is a wide angle view of the sky towards the southern celestial pole. (Canon EOS 7D + Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens @ 15mm, f/3.5, ISO1600, 69s.)

Then from a few hours later, here is another shot showing the Magellanic Clouds next to the dome of the ESO 3.6 metre Telescope. The strong green and orange glow above the horizon is airglow. (FUJIFILM X100S, 23 mm, f/2, ISO 3200, 15s.)

The following two shots are both made from 10 individual images by calculating their average to achieve a better signal-to-noise ratio (a.k.a. to have nicer images with low noise). Each individual frame was taken with a Canon EOS 7D + Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens, f/2, ISO1600, 20s.

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