E aqui estou, mais uma vez na França, um lugar que gosto muito! Como acho que já disse por aqui antes, meu doutorado é realizado em um esquema de co-tutela, no qual sou considerado como aluno de duas universidades: no Brasil da USP, e na França de Bordeaux 1. Aqui na terra do vinho, trabalho no Observatoire de Bordeaux (nome histórico do atual Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux).

100HA and Radioastronomy

The 100 Hours of Astronomy are a success around here! More than 200 activities are happening all-over the country, what means that we are in the honourable second place of the world in terms of “number of events”.

Intellectual silence and webcasts

Due to the IYA2009 activities, my thesis work is almost stopped. I’ve dedicated between two to three hours a day to it. This is absolutely not enough to keep the Science advancing, but at least I was able to finish a technical task: a document to the CNES (the French Space Agency)… though I still need to submit it.

| color caos | by arquera (CC).

[EN] Creativity crisis?

I bet that several bloggers had at least one “creativity crisis” during their blog’s lifetime. I think that I was going through one of such a crisis in the last few weeks. But, Astronomy is a theme that bring us the opportunity to write about an infinity number of subjects. Literally, we can say that we have the entire universe to talk about… So I question myself about why I was unable to write…

[EN] Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy

Image by roparades (http://www.flickr.com/photos/roparedes/).

During the whole last week we worked in the reception of the new undergraduate students here in the University of São Paulo. Particularly, for the Astronomy Department it was a very important week, since it was the reception of its first Bachelor course: the first Bachelor course of its own!

[EN] Astronomy and Samba

In some weeks a very popular festival will start here in Brazil, the carnival. I bet it’s not the first time you hear about it! During this year’s parades we will see astronomy and space related themes in at least in three different cities. As far as I know: Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Atibaia.

[EN] Characterising and observing

Hi! I’ve got a lot of work around in the last days! My group is finishing a paper, and beyond that I am writing (in Java) a code to automatically characterise images of astronomical objects observed by the Gaia satellite. This is an ambitious space mission from ESA that will map in 3D more than one billion objects of our Galaxy. It will also measure the space motion and colours of all those bodies. All this information will allow us, for example, to solve doubts about Milky Way’s structure, dynamics, composition, formation and evolution!

[EN] A whole week!

During the last week, we had the official opening of the IYA2009 in Brazil: throughout the country more than 200 activities were planned, bringing astronomy to tens of thousands of people! As for the official estimate, I will tell you next week, after the information gathering process…

[EN] Coffee and the future of space gastronomy

Just an interlude between Lee’s very nice live postings on the IYA2009 Opening Ceremony to say that astronomers drink a lot of coffee… and that Simon Jones and Charles Fernyhough (Durham Univ., UK) found out in a preliminary investigation (original paper, Univ.PR) that caffeine was positively related to high stress levels and also to hallucination-proneness! I wonder if all those dark things in astronomy were products of our favorite dark beverage… (just kidding!)

[EN] Working in different places and with different subjects…

I am extremely irritated with “La Poste” and “Correios”, the French and the Brazilian postal services, respectively. I’ve sent my books from France to Brazil more than one month ago, and I am still waiting for them - and I’ve chosen the 4 working days delivery service! Well, I hope they arrive soon, since I need some of those (quite expensive, btw) books to work. An astronomer usually lives a part of his/her life outside of his/her original country, and even if there are very nice reasons to live abroad for sometime, there are also some difficulties to face! Such as discover in the last minute that you need to pay some expensive taxes before going back to your country…