Today we had an interesting discussion during ESO’s science coffee here in Garching. We were starting from two articles by Uri Alon that I would like to share with you:
1) How to build a motivated research group, and
2) How to choose a good scientific problem.

Although these articles were written by a molecular biologist/physicist, they can be generalised to any scientific field.
The first article states, that the three pillars of motivation are i) competence, ii) autonomy, and iii) social connectedness. Competence is a prerequisite for motivation. Autonomy is important, as it gives you the feeling that the project originates from you and is not imposed externally. Finally, social connectedness gives the feeling that someone or a group of people cares about you and your project.

These points are very general and can be applied to other “pojects” outside of Academia as well. I just felt very inspired by the simple thoughts that made me think a bit more about my own sources of motivation!

The article ends by giving advice on how to choose a good problem. This is expressed in the TOP model in the following figure. T stands for Talents, O for Objectives, and P for Passions. If you manage to choose a problem to work on that combines your talents with good scientific objective as well as your passions, your all set for a great project!

Good projects are found in the intersection of one’s talents and passions and the objectives/scientific interests of the group. Credit: Molecular Cell

The Hubble Space Telescope is back on stage! You should take a look at all the impressive images that Hubble took during the Early Release Observations (ERO).
You can get more information about the updated telescope and its stunning images from the European or US press releases.

One of my favourite images is clearly this one of the galaxy cluster Abell 370:

Galaxy Cluster Abell 370

Interestingly, this images was taken on my birthday… so I remember very well what a great day it was when somewhere 567 km above the Earth Hubble had opened its eyes and stared at this stunning place in the universe.

I am just coming back from the ‘war room’ meeting for the 24h webcast. Everything is running according to plan, and I tell you there are a lot of helping hands to make this event possible! It’s a shame I did not have my camera with me to show you some first hand pictures… but Lee is doing a great job and committed to a live blog where he will report about the webcast all around the clock!!! Man, don’t you need to sleep at some point?

Would you like to visit some of the most advanced observatories around the world? Would you like to get the chance to talk to the astronomers there about their work, their research interests and about what’s keeping them busy all day and night long?

Are you free on April 3-4? Then join me and my colleagues for 24 hours of Astronomy!

This unique live 24-hour webcast is organised by the European Southern Observatory from its headquarters in Garching, Germany. I work at ESO and luckily got the chance to act as one of the hosts and follow the event behind the scenes. On March 10 the coordinator of the event, Douglas Pierce-Price, did some test runs and recorded a live connection with ESO’s Very Large Telescope, where he talked to Astronomer Marc Huertas. You can watch this preview here.

The 24 hour webcast is part of a worldwide event called 100 hours of Astronomy. One of the goals of this project is “to have as many people as possible look through a telescope as Galileo did for the first time 400 years ago. 100 Hours of Astronomy will take place from 2-5 April when the Moon goes from first quarter to gibbous, good phases for early evening observing. Saturn will be the other highlight of early evening observing events.”

Isn’t that great! The universe brought down to earth! Yours to discover!

If you have questions about the project, or if you would like to ask an astronomical questions during the webcast… send an email to 80t-msg@eso.org, and you’ll be part of it!

At the end of the week I often wonder why it had passed so quickly and what had actually happened. This week was different!

First of all it was Carneval, or ‘Fasching’, as they call it here. I am not a particular fan of carneval, at least I wasn’t during the last fifteen years or so, but now that the kids are starting to enjoy it it gets exciting again. It reminds me so much of my own childhood, when I loved to dress up in fancy costumes and once a year could be a real princess, cowboy or tiger. So, the girls turned the house into a magic place this week. We had an elephant, a panda bear, lady bugs, angles, a little dragon, an Indian girl and the usual two princesses!

On Wednesday, Stephane and I organised the Wine & Cheese seminar at ESO. This is an informal seminar that we organise once a month and as you can guess from the seminar title, we serve wine and cheese. Usually we have three speakers who give a short overview of what they are working on. This time it was dedicated to observing proposals and we heard a very good talk of Bruno Leibundgut on how to write a good proposal. Moreover, Gaitee gave a very good overview of the proposal process specific to ESO. She is a real expert on that, as she works in the Observing Programmes Office.

Then also work went very well, and I got a big step forward with a project that I started about a month ago with my friend and collaborator Jakob. Now the work is on Jakob’s desk and I can take a relaxing weekend with Dirk and the girls…

One sky, one people!

Today I had the real pleasure to attend a talk of Babak A. Tafreshi here at ESO in Garching. Babak is the founder and leader of the project “The World at Night” (or TWAN for short) which he presented in his talk.

copyright: TWAN

TWAN aims to demonstrate that we are all united under one eternally peaceful sky! However, wars are fought over boundaries that have been created in the name of politics, religion, race or beliefs. Take a look at our own planet Earth from space and you will find that our cosmic home is divided only into land and sea. So, we should all work for a better, more peaceful planet for the sake of all the world’s inhabitants.

To create this unifying vision, TWAN has recruited the world’s best night-sky photographers to produce imagery of unrivalled beauty. You have to see these images! They are breathtaking!

Northern stars trail over the 2500-year old giant engraved rock tombs of ancient Persian Achamenid kings, located at Naqshe-Rostam, Fars Province, Iran. Babak Tafreshi/Dreamview.net.

My little daughter, Lena, has fever. She is 15 months old (actually will be 16 months next week) and is teething - so, I think and hope the fever is related to that. Anyway, she is not in the best mood and I have to stay home with her today. Her older sister was very happy to go to the daycare this morning, she loves her daycare. Sometimes she even wants to go there on the weekends

Lena is sleeping now, and so I can get some work done from home. Since I work on my laptop anyway (even when I am in the office), I have all my data and programmes with me. At the moment, I am working on data of spiral galaxies - their motion in particular. I will tell you a bit more about this when I have more time to spend… now I have to speed up so that I can get some more things done before Lena wakes up…

Happy new year to everybody and welcome to my share of the cosmic diary!

I am not a blogger. Not yet. But I might become one during this year! People told me that it can be addictive to blog, we’ll see…

Today is my first office day in 2009! This first day started like any other day… bringing the kids to the daycare, arriving at the office and read what’s new while having a cup of coffee. Usually I start my office day with reading my email, checking the Astronomy picture of the day (APOD), and go through the latest papers on astro-ph. (This is a preprint server, where people send their publications usually before they appear in an astronomical journal.) I can recommend to have a look at the APOD regularly, these are usually beautiful astronomical pictures along with a good explanation on what you see. For example yesterday’s picture of the centre of our Galaxy!

Now, back to work for me!

Looking at the night sky is one of the greatest sources of inspiration!

Have you ever tried it? Have you ever seen the glittering, diffuse band of our own galaxy - the Milky Way!?

It’s breath-taking!… even more when you imagine that this is not the only galaxy in the universe… by far not! It’s only one in a million, maybe billion…

Imagine!