Motivated!

I have submitted my second paper (Yeah!), I am getting good on my bike again (finally my heart rate at a given power output is almost back down to the level where it was at the end of the last season), the new (Kepler) data I will work on seems quite interesting (and I am not getting excited that easily), my talk for this Thursday is ready (and I will give the same talk in May on a conference, so no stressing in the last minute to produce results), I am almost finished with the resubmission of my Kepler GO Proposal (and it is so much easier now that I know how to use the submission system and that I can work with a once already selected proposal), and my pancakes are delicious. I feel quite motivated! (And I have a beard :D)

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MAS

Last week I finished working on my co-authors’ comments, so if my supervisor agrees with everything, then I can submit to the journal when I get her comments back. Joy. On Sunday some of us visited Antwerp, and I have to admit that I start to like this city. Now that I know where the real hidden secrets are, and I am not shocked anymore by the shopping street, it is getting much much better. And to make things better it was the day of the city’s New Year’s Reception, so we got free fries and beer on the main square. (It was a huge success, 15000 people attended!) As the main even of the day we visited the new MAS museum (I have been on the top already last year with Elise, but we did not visit the exhibitions).

And this was free too (as I have not only a student, but a personnel card from the KU Leuven too, and the museum is free for ‘teachers’). I really liked the MAS, both the collection and the way the pieces were presented. We spent almost three hours in there, and left just in time to catch the Moon rising over the port. Then we finished with a nice dinner in a nearby restaurant, situated in an old warehouse, or something like that…

I did some training also on the weekend (indoors, of course), and then the first interval training of this year on Monday after work (just before we went out for dinner to a not-that-special-looking-but-delicious Mexican place). I hope spring will come early and I will have lots of cycling this year! The goal is set :)

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Top 10 of 2011

This time – instead of my traditional summary (read them here: 2008, 2009, 2010) – I will pick out the 10 most memorable things from all the things I have done last year. A bit of extra information behind every entry will help to make it into a nice story.

  1. Riding up to the Roque de los Muchachos from both sides on the same day. Call me crazy, but this was the most amazing day of this year. A day of struggling, cycling 147.4 km with an elevation gain of 5069 meters might make other people question your sanity, but the rewarding feeling of great achievement afterwards worth every drop of sweat. All this on the amazing island of La Palma, volcanic rock formations, pine tree forests and vast mountain landscapes, there are not many places like this on the planet. This was part of my epic cycling holidays (17-22 May), with a total of 4 rides, 451.70 km, and an elevation gain of 12,062.0 metres. I also rode around the island on another epic day.
  2. Riding up to the Mont Ventoux. A few days after crushing into a car and breaking my nice aero wheels :( I was already back on my bike :) riding one of the most iconic climbs of  road cycling. It was the main event of the (partly) cycling holidays in France (thanks again for the invitation, Valery), perfect weather, hundreds of cyclists on the roads, awesome pictures, great company. And the final time of 1h 38m 41s is quite good for someone who only started cycling in 2010. Also this contributed to my best mont (July) on the road summing up to 1,256.32 km.
  3. Track cycling in the velodrome of Gent. Not only one of the best things last year, but one of the best things I have done in Belgium ever. Riding on the track is an amazing experience, the pace is high, the curves are steep, and the atmosphere can not be described with words. It is just a big blur of the track and the other riders around you. We have even made a nice video, and I also experienced how does it feel when someone crashes in front of you while riding with 40-45 km/h. Luckily I did not experience how does it feel to crash with this speed…
  4. My first first-author paper got published. There is no exception, every PhD student gets happy about this. Seeing your work in print is always a nice thing. I also kept my proposal acceptance rate at 100%, with an accepted Kepler Guest Observer proposal and a successful NOAO proposal to the 6.5 meter MMT in Arizona. So this year I am going to the USA (among others)!
  5. Visualising and analysing cycling workouts. I have written a nice python script to plot and analyse my rides, providing me with information which is way beyond the capabilities of Garmin Connect. To read more about this, head over the original posts: 1, 2, and 3. I would take the opportunity here to write down the totals from 2011 (and the values compared to 2010): 224h 39m 27s of cycling (+84%), 6,204.16 kilometres (+86%), 50,758.0 metres of elevation gain (+128%), and 176,855 Calories burned (+72%). The goal for 2012 is 7000 km.
  6. Night sky photography from and with Mercator. This year I had 4 observing runs (3 on La Palma and 1 on Tenerife, with a total of 40 nights at the telescope), and for the last one I left my bike at home and brought my photo gear with me instead. This resulted in quite some spectacular images, especially the post about the Draconid meteor storm got quite some attention over the internet. Then to prove that we can create nice outreach images with our telescope too, I produced colour images of a planetary nebula and Jupiter.
  7. Great personal best to Mechelen and back. No explanation needed, it was a superb ride, flying with the aero wheels after more than two weeks of high altitude training. Now that I have broken those wheels, I do not really expect to break this record in 2012 (without further expenses). But who knows ;)
  8. 8 Hours Cycling @ Spa-Francorchamps. A great race with the AstroTeam, the experience of cycling, racing in the rain on the Belgian F1 track is something money can’t buy (for everything else, there’s MasterCard).
  9. The climb from Masca in the Teno Mountains. This was a climb on my last day during my cycling holidays on Tenerife (24-29 May, 4 rides, 441.98 km, an elevation gain of 10,684.0 metres). Epic scenery, 4.0 km @ 10.8% with a maximum over 100 meters of 16.8%, scorching sunshine, no wind, zipped open jersey, pedalling out of the saddle all way long, bad asphalt, so although it was ‘only’ a 2nd category climb, this was the most memorable slope of this holiday…
  10. Skiing. For the first time in several years, I went on a skiing holiday (only a long weekend though). I really love skiing, and I am quite good at it, so :)

Making this selection was way more difficult than I expected it to be, so I feel happy about the year. And I did not even mention the great photo-excursions with Elise, the experience I gained in electric assembly, wall painting, and terrace constructions while helping Tijl at his (now almost finished) house, the memories of several exceptional rides alone or with members of the newly formed AstroTeam, my surprise visit to Hungary, finishing the 2010-2011 season with a bronze medal in the Adults’ 1st Division of the Belgian Floorball League (and then quitting floorball…), getting a MacBook Air, etc. So yes, this was a good year. The only thing I still kinda miss is a girlfriend…

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Monthly Notices (Vol. 1)

But not the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ;) Anyway, I always publish in Astronomy and Astrophysics… Sorry for the bad astronomical joke… (If you can call this a joke…) But as I had no posts recently on the blog, I have to admit there is no better title for this entry. And this might get more and more common in the future, as my motivation for blogging is lower and lower these days.

Starting with a reference to A&A was not completely accidental, as I spent November and the beginning of December working hard to finish my second first-author paper, which I will submit to the mentioned journal in January. I spent several evenings at the Institute to meet my internal deadlines, but it was not that difficult (the stress is on the relative difficulty, I am not complaining that I had not enough pressure or tasks to deal with), as November is the low season in cycling (which means that I basically did not ride at all), so I had nothing else to do. Now the paper is basically 99% finished, and my supervisors – and me too – are very happy with the work I have done. We still need to wait for the final comments from the rest of my co-authors (I have already received two very positive ones with only minor comments to consider), but then it should not take more than a week of work before I can really submit after the Holidays. So I expect to have a second paper by the time I turn 27. Damn, I am getting old…

No matter how much work I have, I do not work on the weekends, this is one of my principles. This way I could join my friends to Bredene (where we played board games, had a great walk along the nice coast of Belgium across high grass and sand dunes in the wind – unluckily I expected crappy weather so I had only my phone with me to take pictures with, instead of my DSLR -, and we went to the concert of the Symfonisch Orkest van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel in which Ilse plays the French horn), help Tijl in building his terrace, play FIFA12 online (sometimes I rock, sometimes I suck, it really depends on how much I can concentrate, so now I do not play it anymore after midnight), and watch Rules of Engagement (thanks to Clio’s suggestion), which is really great (and especially Season 5 is hilarious).

After I was done with the paper, I had time to do other things too. First of all I took part in our programming battle at work (no results yet – update from January, 2012: I won 2 out of the 4 categories, the precision, and the length (so the shortness) -, but it was a nice task to solve, and I did it using python of course), then – maybe I had a bit too much time in my hands – I have written a small code to do N-body simulations in 3D. It was something I always wanted to try, and it was even useful, because I finally managed to figure out how to do 3D plotting in python, and how to do numerical integration using different methods. So it was not a waste of time at the end. (See video and description on Youtube.)

In December I restarted training on the indoor trainer (this is already the beginning of the next cycling season), and the AstroTeam went to the Velodrome in Gent again, now in our custom cycling kit, as a real team. I was a bit annoyed by the fact that I had forgotten my helmet at home, so I had to rent a crappy one, but besides this small mishappening, it was a great evening. I did three twenty minute sessions, and in the last one (which was the best of all) while I was riding with a fast group (at approximately 40-45 km/h), high, near the top of the curve, the guy in front of me crashed (after touching the rear wheel of the biker in front of him), and although I had already accepted the seemingly inevitable, that I would unavoidably crash into him or his bike turned across the slope in front of me, I passed him by centimetres as he slipped down the steep banks quick enough… I was a little bit shocked. I have never been this close to a real, classical bike crash. It was really something you normally see on the TV.

Now I am back in Hungary for the holidays, so I might have time to write about other (hopefully more interesting) things during these two weeks.

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