Well the weekend has gone by in a flash here at Rio. We had the mandatory city tour visiting “Christ the Redeemer” and the “Sugar loaf mountain“. Pics after the break

Four days have gone by filled with lot of interesting happenings at the IAU GA. The last time I wrote, I had just reached Rio. This post will try to summarize the last few days in brief. We had booked our accommodation at Rio using the services of an agency on the web. It turned out that the email we received about the accommodation had different details (the ’small print’) as compared to what was on the link provided ‘describing’ the accommodation. We were rather shocked when we reached.

Let that be a lesson not to pay and book in advance for the entire period when going to a new place. Not much option to change if you make that mistake (as we did…). Anyhow, we are now reasonably well settled in this ‘hostel’. We aren’t the only ones in this place. For company we have members of the organizing committee from the previous General Assembly at Prague (2006). The saving grace is the nice breakfast and the wifi (which is faster than that at the convention center). We have started to use the kitchen quite extensively to cook and have dinner…

Ok. I have to get some sleep now… So more later folks and keep tuned in…

Now in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, for the IAU General Assembly. We (two colleagues and I) arrived Sunday evening Rio time. Four flights (all on time!) : the first one from Ahmedabad to Mumbai in India and then on to Sao Paulo via Johannesburg and finally another short hop from Sao Paulo to Rio.

… We leave today evening from Ahmedabad, India, to participate in the IAU, General Assembly at Rio de Janeiro.

I realize that it has been a long time since my last post - over two months in fact! Been busy with a lot of things. Lots of interesting things have happened in this time.

This will be the first time I shall be going to a General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union.

In a comment to my first post on this blog, I was asked why we use Linux…   While I write up a more complete post on the answer to why Astronomers use Linux, you may want to see the following two posts from the WWW:

One of the nice things about astronomy is that there are no borders in the skies.   Interesting events happening in the sky can be seen by people from all over.    There may be some variations in appearance - for example the celestial gathering late last year of Jupiter, Venus and the Moon appeared as a frown in the Western Hemisphere  and as a smile in Asia.

It has been a week since I got my Cosmic Diary password but could not write earlier due to family members being sick.  I still don’t have access to the internet at our new home.

1234567890!  That is the number of seconds that will have elapsed this weekend (on Valentine’s day for us in India!) since 1st January 1970.