Science and Arts
Meeting Alan Parsons
In many occasions I wrote in this blog that my passion for astronomy was accompanied by a deep passion for music. It was around 1978, or 1979, when a strong link between the skies and the music of the Alan Parsons Project started to develop. Besides the "spatial" character of several pieces (especially the instrumental ones), many texts contain references to astronomical objects. And so, partially because of this, and partially because of a certain imagination on my side, the two things became strongly related. Even after the... read more ❯
Rock Star Paul Young encounters the Stars @ ESO
I am sick, at home. Stomach not working as originally designed. Therefore I find some time to blog. These last days have been very busy with the organization of the ESO Observing Programmes Committee, the board that selects the scientific projects that make to the ESO telescopes, including the VLT. I'll tell you more about that; for the time being it suffices to say that we have received 969 valid proposals for the next semester, with all what this entails...
Today I finished the review of a PhD Thesis from the Australian National University. A very good one, a pleasure to... read more ❯
Lost a chance, maybe forever
Yesterday, while digging into more than 800 emails (already excluding spam) received during my summer vacation, I realized I have lost one of THE chances of my life. Scrolling down the list, searching for the most urgent things, I stumbled upon a message with a strange subject:
From the Dark Side of the Moon to Paranal
The sender is my colleague astronomer and good, old friend Martino Romaniello, who is well aware of some of my passions. I open the message. It starts with
!!!!
followed by a web link. I click on it and I see the picture you can also see here:
That... read more ❯
Back from the light design conference in Drammen - Norway
Busy days... things have [somewhat unexpectedly] changed in my professional life (I'll blog about this when I'm settled. I just anticipate I'm still an astronomer ;-)), and this comes at a time where many other things are happening.
Our paper on the very old stars was re-submitted after the first pass of the second referee. Now there is one serious point that needs to be addressed, which is the possibility that those stars are actually pre-Main-Sequence stars. I'll write more in a future post.
Another article on the connection between... read more ❯