Institute

The International Astronomical Union and UNESCO declared 2009 as The International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009), a global effort to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery. JIVE participated in multiple events to mark IYA2009 and to raise awareness of its efforts, particularly e-VLBI:

• 15-16 January 2009 - Marathon e-VLBI observation and demonstration. JIVE coordinated a nearly continuous 33-hour e-VLBI observation, involving 17 telescopes in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America, and demonstrated live at the IYA2009 Opening Ceremony in Paris. As a result, e-VLBI was showcased as a newly-available, production-level astronomical technique to over 900 inquisitive and enthusiastic attendees, including astronomers, diplomats, government representatives and students from over 100 countries. In addition, an educational web site about e-VLBI, including a Virtual Radio Interferometer, was also demonstrated continues to be available online at http://www.expres-eu.org/iya2009/index.html.
  

• 3-5 April 2009 - e-VLBI observations and webcast. - JIVE coordinated e-VLBI observations with 14 telescopes on 3 April and 5 April and participated in “Around the World in 80 Telescopes, Live 24-hour Research Observatory Webcasts”, a collection of 20-minute webcasts from observatories around the world. The JIVE webcast featured an overview of VLBI and e-VLBI astronomy techniques, discussion of the e-VLBI observations taking place, and a live Q&A session with Huib van Langevelde and Arpad Szomoru.
• 5 April 2009 - Weekend van de Sterren. - 7500 people attended “Weekend of the Stars” at NEMO science centre in Amsterdam, where Huib van Langevelde gave a talk on “A Telescope as Big as Europe”. Huib's talk included a live chat session with operators at JIVE conducting an e-VLBI observation.

(Neither event was particularly noteworthy for JIVE, but should be included if the Annual Report is to serve as an official record of activities. -ksy) JIVE and ASTRON have moved to a biennial schedule for the jointly-hosted Open Day. 2009 was due to be an “off year”, but in light of 2009 as the International Year of Astronony, we participated in Sterrendag 2009 hosted by the Planetron in Dwingeloo with the EXPReS display and posters. An official Open Day was held again on 24 October 2010 at the Westerbork telescope with volunteers showing visitors how to use the Virtual Interferometer and answering questions.

In April 2010, JIVE launched a new web site based on Drupal. The idea was to bring the look of the site into the 21st century, as well as to simplify edits and page creation with a WYSIWYG content management system (with some limited capability for manual HTML coding).

Support Scientist Losses: Giuseppe Cimo departed to the Space Applications Group 1 January 2009. Antonis Polatidis departed to ASTRON 1 February 2009.

Support Scientist Gains: Mehreen Mahmud arrived 3 August 2009, coming from the University of Cork. Yurii Pidopryhora transfered from EXPReS 1 September 2009 (from April 2009, he was working half-time in the support group).

Operator Losses/Gains: none