Ferdinando

July 22, 2009

Public lecture on life in the universe

Just a quick one. I will be giving a public lecture on the search for life in the universe. Being an astronomer I will mainly focus on the astrophysical aspects, but I will also touch upon related subjects. The lecture […]
July 7, 2009

A visit to Oxford

Working at ESO gives great professional and social opportunities. Being at the center of European experimental astronomy, is the place where many new and exciting things take place. For this reason it attracts scientists and engineers from all over the […]
May 12, 2009

Herschel and Planck ready for launch in two days!

A [very] quick one. ESA’s Herschel and Planck will be launched on May 14 from French Guiana. See this press release for more details. Keep checking the ESA website for updates, this is going to be exciting.
May 11, 2009

CERN’s Director for Science at ESO: an outlook of LHC

As I had announced in my previous post, last Tuesday there were great expectations here at ESO for the arrival of Prof. Sergio Bertolucci, CERN‘s Director for Science, who had accepted to give a talk on the Large Hadron Collider. […]
April 30, 2009

Sergio Bertolucci, Director for Research at CERN, comes to ESO to talk about LHC

When I was ten or so, I was already a science enthusiast, even though I certainly did not know what science actually meant (to be honest I cannot say I fully understand it even now). But I remember I was […]
January 21, 2009

X-Shooter goes on sky – 5th episode

We are now running our last night. It is very strange, since it looks like we had arrived only yesterday. Thoughts and images start to be confused and I am at a loss in trying to put them in the […]
January 19, 2009

X-Shooter goes on sky again and again (Nights 2, 3 and 4)

It is Monday morning and I am sitting in the control room of the VLT, at the console of UT3-Melipal, with Elena, Joel and Duncan. It is half past three, Chilean time, and we still have a couple of hours […]
January 18, 2009

X-Shooter goes on sky again (Night 1)

As we get out of the residencia (probably better known to the public as la perla de las dunas after the last 007 movie) I can feel the excitement in the team. There are a number of technical things we […]
January 17, 2009

X-Shooter on sky again (Day 2)

This morning I woke up thinking I was still in my bed in the old, cold Europe. But no. I could hear the wind blowing and the taste of dry air in my mouth and all of a sudden I […]