Sander Slijkhuis

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sander slijkhuis
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2011 1:25 pm

Sander Slijkhuis

Post by sander slijkhuis »

Hello,
I'm an amateur astronomer, with a professional background in data processing from spectrographs for observations of the Earth's atmosphere. I graduated in astronomy in Amsterdam a loong time ago, since then I have been working in Earth atmosphere observation, but always kept an interest in astronomy. I moved to southern Germany, and in the weekend I'm living with my family on the first hill of the Alps - where the sky is still fairly dark. A few years ago I decided to marry my astronomical interest to my professional skill, and I have started to build my own spectrographs. Unfortunately I had to learn that there is a big difference between theory and practice, but I'm improving ;)

At the moment I have a mobile setup with a self-built echellette spectrograph behind a 6" INTES MK66, but I am changing to a fixed pier with EQ-6 and C9.25 - as always there are still some problems to solve before that will be fully operational. Because there is no software for handling my echelette spectra, and because I was not fully satisfied with the [documentation of] existing software, I started to write my own software in Python. Currently, that takes most of my time so there is not much left for reducing the spectra I take.
It's all a kind of uphill struggle at the moment, but I'm slowly progressing..

My current interest is in P Cyg and Yellow Supergiants, such as rho Cas, but also RV Tauri and UU Her variables.
Actually my interest is in everything, but I have to limit myself..
I was very pleased to visit the OHP workshop, and hope to see you not only virtually, but also in person again.

Sander
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