While I am still waiting for the Astronomy Distant Learning courses at Lancashire University, the IT-programming courses are already running for three weeks. The last two weeks there were no courses due to the fact that the teacher became a father, and while enjoying is newly acquired parenthood, he instructed us to learn some chapters in advance and prepare some exercises.
Since last week, I started polishing my 27cm diameter telescope mirror at Campus Sterre Ghent University. First with polishing tape and tomorrow I will continue with pitch to parabolise the mirror. My future Newton telescope is a F5 and should be build for en equatorial mount. Deborah started to grind her 15cm and she is quite fast flying through it. After 3 hours of grinding, she already cut the curve shape for a 6,5F. The next session at Ghent, she already switched powder twice and she currently uses powder 240
Two weeks ago we visited La Coupole and le PLUS in France with the AEG (Astro Event Group). La Coupole is a former Nazi facility where they built and launched the V2-rockets. The allied forces managed to neutralize it before it could have impacted the war outcome differently. This site harbours a very important link to the space race between the US and Russia after WWII, with the ex-Nazi rocket builder Wernher von Braun at the base of the development of the first rocket's moon landing.
Le PLUS stands for Palais de L'Universe et Science, and apart of the wonderful exhibition that displays our life, development and place in the universe, it also has a new magnificent planetarium, which not only presents the night sky in an extraordinary way, but also introduces the ALMA radio telescope project in Chile due for initiation in 2012.
We are resuming a sort of exchange teaching programme with a Chinese student, which started last Spring. While the student would exercise Chinese with Deborah, I would help improving the student's oral English and translation skills.
