During my Ph. D. thesis, I was involve in the following classes:

• "Zonnestelsel" (Solar System - with H. Henrichs),

• "Astrophysica" (with L. Kaper),

• "Astrofysica van compacte objecten" (Astrophysics of compact objects - with R. Wijnands)

• "Waarneempracticum" (Observational project with R. Waters.) This last class is my favorite one and I have been part of the team for three periods. During this project the (master) student have to think about an astronomical project, write a proposal which is carefully study by a committee, go to La Palma to do the observations at the Mercator Telescope and finally come home to reduce the data to finally write a report, similar to what a professional paper should be. More about this project, the project reports and manuals, please see below

Students' projects:

(February - August 2005):

  - Exoplanets by O. Slooten (pdf file)
 - Morphology of nearby galaxies by A. Kapinska (pdf file)
 - Peculiarities in X-ray binaries SS 433 and V* V615 by G. van de Akker & R. de Rooij (pdf file)
 - Geometry of Planetary Nebulae and Thickness of their Ionization Shells by O. van Braam & A. de Vries (pdf file)
 - High resolution imaging of Jupiter, its moons, Saturn and its rings by N.D. Degenaar & C.J.H. Kruip (pdf file)
 - Basic observations of gravitational lenses by Y. Grange (pdf file)
 - BL Lacertae Objects by J. Withagen (Sorry, not available)
 - The orbit and color of Pluto and Quaoar by K. Peters (Sorry, not available)



(September - December 2005):

 - Galaxies by T. Coenen & S. Hardeman (pdf file)
 - Exoplanets by A. Teenstra & D. Meeburg (pdf file)
 - Light echos by N. Miensen & B. Dianiska (pdf file)
 - Asteroid Tracking by H. Veerman & T. de Boer (pdf file)
 - Dark Clouds by B. Hismtra & J. M. van Breemen (pdf file)
 - Gravitational Lenses by M.P. Visser & T.M. Weller (pdf file)

(September - December 2006):
to come....

Manuals and links:

Important webpages:

• Mercator telescope

• Weather conditions at the mountain

• SkyEye (CNR Istituto di Radioastronomia, Bologna, Italy) best for full-resolution images

• SkyView (Goddard Space Flight Center, US) best for binned images

• LEDAS (University of Leicester, UK) good for both full-resolution and binned images

• Hubble Data Archive (STScI, US)

• UK HST Support Facility (Cambridge, UK)

• SIMBAD Astronomical Database - And why not Aladin?

• ADS (for papers - also try Astro-ph)

• Eric Deutsch's Links to Astronomical Databases
  
  
  Important things to check/download:
  - what is a ccd -- ps file
  - Johnson system plot
  - Geneva system plot
  - Example and just examples of rdb files (P7) and (CCD)
  - Proposal template tex file
  - Synthetic Geneva magnitudes of the kurucz model atmospheres. To convert to colours, people have to subtract V-B, U-B, etc; otherwise the numbers are not useful in comparing to the Geneva catalogs.