How it all happened... Since my childhood I enjoyed looking in my fathers books from Time Life. Especially the book about the universe pulled my attention. The pictures in this book were made by the, at that moment the biggest, reflectortelescope on Mount Palomar. Although no Hubbletelescope pictures, the photographs taken, were fascinating enough to awaken my passion for astronomy. The set of books is still in my possession. Our mathematics teacher in the 3 last years of secondary school was also very interested in astronomy and he had a 15cm Newton telescope. When there was a mooneclips or when the giant planets Jupiter and Saturnus were visible, we enjoyed looking to these events through his telescope. When I was 18, I build together with my father my first telescope, a 15cm Newtontelescope. At that time it was a rather big instrument, but now we are used to a lot more. During my studentsperiod and afterwards, I kept on reading articles in the newspapers about astronomy. But lack of time and other interests cooled down the passion a little bit. Until the end of 1998... a collegue once again awakened my astronomy interests and I made contact with several other amateur astronomers in the neighbourhood of Kruibeke. We founded the "Astronomische Werkgroep Mercator", named as I our famous cartograph Geeraard De Creemer from Rupelmonde. But not only astronomy, also archaeo-astronomy, archaeology, photography interests me. You wil find on my website several pages dedicated to one of these subjects. Not all of the pages are translated into English, if you visit the Dutch part, there are a lot more subjects available.