In praise of Ger de Bruyn

In the late seventies, after the wonderful WSRT had been operational for almost a decade, ASTRON was finally allowed to hire 6 active astronomers to assist it in its noble mission: to design, build and operate world-class radio telescopes. Dan Harris, Richard Strom, Richard Schilizzi, Ger de Bruyn, Vijay Kapahi and Gordon Robertson were a magnificent batch, who all went on to greatness. They made a real difference to ASTRON's ability to serve the astronomical community, and none more so than Ger.

Of course he was a highly knowledgeable user of the ASTRON telescopes, who was able to get the highest quality results with these instruments. He also planned and executed highly complex observing programs like WENSS (WSRT), and EoR (LOFAR). He played an important role in the definition of new telescopes like LOFAR and SKA, and in commissioning LOFAR. And as a 30% professor in Groningen, he supervised a glittering series of PhD's, of whom he was extremely proud.

But arguably his greatest contribution was to the development of data reduction software for radio observations. In the decades after the Selfcal revolution around 1980, the Dynamic Range of radio images increased by almost 5 orders of magnitude, from only 100 to as much as 8 million! Wide-field, broad-band, and full-polarization. Ger did not write software himself, apart from laborious processing scripts in Super-Mongo. But he knew how to motivate talented software developers by appreciating (and advertising!) their work. Even more importantly, he was prepared to work very hard in testing the software on real data, and he had a knack for gently asking helpful questions. Very often, when I stumbled into my office in the morning, he was already there, impatient to discuss the maps he had produced overnight. In fact, he was the perfect partner in what we now call Self-propelled Golden Teams, the most succesful model for producing useful user software. We need more of his kind.

E-mail: lofarschool@astron.nl