Hi All,

It has been a while since I last wrote a post, but here I am reporting again about whats going on in my life at the moment. I am writing to you from Heidelberg, Germany, where I’m currently attending the Max Planck summer school on “Statistical inference from astrophysical data”…

Hi All,

Last night I was lucky enough to attend (got free tickets) the opening ceremony of the Maccabiah. The Maccabiah is a big sport event held in Israel every 4 years. Jewish athletes from all over the world take part in it.

Two for the price of one…well almost. Today the European space agency successfully launched two satellites, Herschel and Planck, into space on board an Ariane 5 rocket. A lot of people waited for this launch, as these two different satellites should provide us some new insights on the past of our universe….

Hi All,

For the last week and a half I’ve been in Marseille, France. The main purpose of my visit was to attend the CosmoClusters workshop which ended last Wednesday. The workshop was, as you can understand from its name, about galaxy clusters. The workshop was great, lots of people (about 50) and therefore also a lot of lectures (also one of mine)…

 
A few weeks ago, while most of you celebrated the weekend of 100 hours of astronomy, Tel-aviv, The biggest city in Israel, and the city I live in, celebrated its 100 birthday….

 
Well as I wrote in my last post, I  was very busy in the last two weeks. One of the things I was working on is a proposal for NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope. Since the earth atmosphere blocks X-rays (fortunately for us), X-ray telescopes are space-based…

In the last week or so I’ve been swamped with various tasks. I’m working on a paper summarizing the results of my gravitational lensing study, and I really have to finish it soon. Dani, my advisor, and I have decided to submit a Chandra (an X-ray telescope in space) proposal so I’ve been working on that too and the deadline is Mach 17. On top of that, I’ve got notice that i have to leave my apartment and now I’m in the middle of searching for a new place. I have to rent a new apartment by the end of this month and I still have not found one. So you can imagine how busy I am ….

Well its about time I would write about the rest of my weekend in Paris….

As you probably recall, I got a free trip to Paris from Keren parents and was about to meet with Keren and Ben there (check out my “Weekend in Paris - Part 1″ post).

After falling asleep in my hotel at about midnight on Friday night, I got a phone call at about 1 am from Ben telling me that they have finally arrived at the hotel. He also said that unfortunately, Keren hurt her leg at the train station. I immediately went to there room to finally meet them. It was a happy reunion…

There is nothing like getting a phone call asking you if you want a free trip to Paris…

Last Wednesday I got a phone call from Keren’s mom. Keren is my good friend and colleague who have  just finished her PhD (at Tel-Aviv university) and began her post doc in Chicago. She is married to Ben who is also an astrophysicist.  Anyway, Keren and Ben went to Marseille, France, to collaborate with Prof. Jean-Paul Kneib. Keren parents were suppose to fly to Paris and spend the weekend with them there. Unfortunately, there was family emergency, and they couldn’t go. Instead, they offered the flight ticket and hotel room to me.

Hi all,

Today it is an election day in Israel, yes again !!! It seems that in the ten or so last years the political situation is unstable so we have an election about every two years instead of every four. This time its been three years since the last election. Actually, the day after the previous election was a day to remember. The previous elections were held on March 28, 2006. On that day, I went to vote and right afterwards I hopped on a plane, with a large group of friends, and went to Turkey. The purpose of our trip was to observe the total solar eclipse on March 29.