Outreach

A collection of some of my outreach projects.

Mobile Planetarium

For the last six years I have regurarly gone around Dutch schools and general events with an inflatable planetarium to give astronomy classes.

Heel Nederland Kijkt Sterren

On the 21st of Oktober 2015 I participated in the Dutch version of 'The Sky at Night'. During this live television event I had a ~60s segment where I explained what meteorites are.

Leiden Heliostat

In January 2015 we have started a heliostat project for the Old Observatory in Leiden, this would be a solar telescope for the public and it would project a 1m solar image in the visitors centre. To gather the money to build it the faculty decided to use crowd funding which was enormously successful, as we got over 20,000 euro in less than a month. Here you can see the youtube video for that project with me doing some of the talking. As the project coordinator I got to work with a diverse team of astronomers, amateurs, optical designers and instrument makers. We had a bare bone model running for the solar eclipse on the 20th of March and officially unveiled it during the mercury transit one year later. Here you can see a photo book of the building process.

I have been interviewed for the 5 'o clock news for the first unveiling during the eclipse. Click here to see. (@ 12:55)

Kaiser Lente Lezingen

In 2014 I was the president of the astronomical study association 'L.A.D. F Kaiser' and in that year we started a series of public lectures called the 'Kaiser Lente Lezingen' (Kaiser Spring Lectures). For these lectures we invited famous astronomers from over the country and let them speak in the Old Observatoy. The lectures are now an annual thing run by Leiden astronomy students and one of the most successful public astronomy lecture series in the country. (Although I got to admit that not many of those exist)

Last update 2/3/2017 by Alex