My head is still buzzing when I think about last weekend. I’m not often lost for words anyway, but I get so much energy from so many good things happening around me, that I’ll probably come across as a bouncing ball… This all started out with me daydreaming in a train to Amsterdam though, last Friday afternoon.
I love travelling. I love the feeling of not having to do lots, other than getting from ‘A to B’ and sharing thoughts with someone else. I also love travelling on my own though. You never know who you might meet along the way and what the world will look like through a window in the train that day. This day it looked sunny and serene when three guys and one woman came to sit next to me. One of the guys gave me a friendly warning that if I was sitting there for a quiet trip, I might want to move. I didn’t. Instead I put away my magazine and learned what people working at a tax office really do. When the train stopped, Mats (the guy sitting in front of me), quickly went to get more drinks and offered me the bag (with a juice), to put in all the soaps I would take from my hotel.
After saying goodbye to them, I took the time to find my hotel and it turned out to be right across the street of the studios where I went for the TV interview of ‘De Wereld Draait Door’. I checked in and met Femke from ASTRON. She is great. We had been e-mailing each other a lot, so I already knew she’s a fantastic organiser and it was nice to finally meet her. Our hotel didn’t do breakfast, so next morning we went to the ‘supermarket to go’ and then it was time to check out NEMO. It was a big science playground! I loved it right away. After saying hi to a few familiar faces, I found out I had a place with about twenty computers to myself, right next to my poster (which looked awesome that big)!
When the doors officially opened, it was immediately busy. I was already telling a few people what ‘Galaxy Zoo’ is and how you can be an astronomer yourself, when I heard Tommy asking for me. He came over from London for this weekend! Later Jan, another ‘Zoo friend’, joined in as well and I couldn’t have done it without them. I’m used to talking to bigger groups, but in this situation – where people come in and out – I really needed the extra voices. We still hadn’t had lunch at three o’clock, when I found myself talking to an English family, while Tommy was helping two Dutch guys. We had lots of different people visiting us: kids, adults, people from Germany, France and England. People who came in and asked if ‘The’ Hanny from Hanny’s Voorwerp was around and people who had never heard of that discovery before. It was amazing to see that in an exciting place like this, lots of them still wanted to sit down and try ‘our project’. And thanks to Chris for printing those login codes, they went home with their own accounts.
In the evening Tom and I went to check out the city and got lost in it. I think that was due to him being a gentleman and letting me lead the way, as I kept wanting to find out if it was the next street we were looking for. I was glad he took over when we only saw big office buildings though. I’m not a quitter but ‘having sense of direction’ is not one of my talents. Oh well, we had fun. And we were prepared for another busy day, even though Tommy would have to leave after lunch. Jan, who said he was very impressed meeting some of the well-known people in ‘astronomy land’, had called his friend and ‘Zooite’ Arie to tell him I really needed his help on Sunday and luckily he could make it!
I’ll write about the Sunday in a different column though, so this one is ‘to be continued’…
NEMO. (Picture: Hanny van Arkel).
The other poster, about Hanny’s Voorwerp and the investigaions in Dwingeloo, made by Josh! (Picture: Hanny van Arkel.)
Tommy trying to call for more help in our very nice ‘classroom’. (Picture: Hanny van Arkel.)
2 Comments
A very exciting weekend indeed, I got an ASTRON ‘crew’ t-shirt.:) and the help I called for was not far away.
Great to do this for the 100 hours of astronomy and amazing to be able to teach the kids how to classify (and the adults), so much fun. Hanny, I still smile when I remember how the kids all called you ‘miss’ lol
looks like an exciting weekend indeed!
good to read you were such enthousiastic GZ ambassadors…
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[...] still had some automatic accounts left from the event we did in NEMO, so we used those to try classifying galaxies right after a few good questions. They did very well [...]