Daily Image
23-04-2009
ASTRON at 60 - the digital celebration!
| Submitter: | Femke Boekhorst |
| Description: | Today, ASTRON celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. On the 23rd of April 1949, ASTRON was founded as the "Stichting Radiostraling van Zon en Melkweg" (SRZM) by a group of astronomers and engineers led by Leiden professor, Jan Hendrik Oort (1900-1992). The prime activity of the SRZM was to develop and operate radio telescopes, a goal that remains at the heart of the ASTRON mission statement 60 years on. The first experiments used surplus wartime radar dishes left behind by the German army. Since 1949, ASTRON has grown from twenty employees to about 165 staff members today. Today we also host and support JIVE and the NOVA optical/IR laboratory. To mark the beginning of the next, say, sixty years, ASTRON is launching her new website today. The website has a new design, made by Kuipers and Strikwerda (www.kuenst.nl), and is driven by the open source system Drupal, implemented by QRIOS web development (www.qrios.nl). The new and improved ASTRON website facilitates contributions from many individuals, and offers a much more flexible and user friendly development environment. We hope this will ensure that the web site is much more dynamic than before and provides up-to-date information on all our activities. The design of the new website has very much been influenced by the ASTRON huisstijl. The light blue colour of the huisstijl has become the corporate colour on the website. For the Astronomy Group, the Radio Observatory and Research & Development divisons, darker colours have been chosen: dark purple, dark green and dark blue. The banners on top of every page represent the specific divisions. New items can be found on the website as well, a press room has been added to the site and more information about planning a career at ASTRON. The navigation on the site has been greatly improved by adding features such as bread crumbs and roll out menus that allow you to see exactly where you are on the website. Please feel free to send us your comments and suggestions about our new website to boekhorst@astron.nl ! |
| Copyright: | ASTRON |
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