Monthly Archives: January 2010

January 25, 2010

Archaeoastronomy: reconnecting to reality. Part I.

I like astronomy very much at the level that I can say mine is not a profession, is rather a passion. But there are gray areas here and there. One of them, maybe the most important, is the level of ...

January 24, 2010

Late meetings. People who make beautiful things.

This has nothing to do with Astronomy (or maybe it does, but this it is not so important). I am just back from the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich, where David Fray gave a very impressive concert, playing Schubert and Bach. ...

January 21, 2010

Early meetings. People who make things happen.

Like everyday, this morning I brought my little son to the kinder-garden. On the way I met Tim de Zeeuw, the Director General of ESO. From the window of my office I can see his and I had noticed he ...

January 14, 2010

Five exoplanets discovered by Kepler – a discussion and a movie

I mentioned on this blog on several occasions (see "the first light") the Kepler mission which aims at detecting exoplanets through the transit method (a.k.a the small attenuation of light due to the passage of the exoplanet between us and ...

January 13, 2010

2010 AL30 – recent results and discussions

Some news about this interesting target. As a reminder, it will make its close flyby on Wednesday January 13 at 12:46 pm UT (4:46 pm PST) so in a few hours, when it will pass at 122,000 km from Earth. Yesterday, Tuesday ...

January 12, 2010

Asteroid 2010 AL30 – a close Earth flyby on Jan 13!

The new hype in our community: 2010AL30, a 10-60m asteroid will be passing at 1/3 the distance Earth-Moon on Jan 13. Interestingly because its period is 1 year, like Earth, it was suggested that it could be a man made ...

January 12, 2010

Solar Eclipse 2010 in Sri Lanka

As many of you might already know, the first solar eclipse for the year is on January 15th. This will be visible in Northern Sri Lanka, a part of the country that was not accessible to public until recently due ...

January 12, 2010

Belated New Year wishes

First of all wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2010. Hope everyone had a good vacation. I am officially still on vacation in Melbourne. We have been enjoying many sunny days here (some days bit too hot). We ...

January 8, 2010

The road to scientific advance

While reading Rare Earths by Peter Ward, I found the following quotation: "Much of the work we do as scientists involves filling in the details about matters that are basically understood already, applying standard techniques to new specific cases. But occasionally ...

January 1, 2010

Happy New Year – future of this blog?

I did not write on this blog for almost 15 days. The vacation time came shortly after the AGU meeting and I basically spent a lot of time with my family. So this post is primarily written to wish all ...