March 15, 2010

A bright future is ahead of us.

The CIE conference started this morning, with quite a nice opening ceremony. An actor, impersonating no less of a man than Thomas Alva Edison, and holding a shining bulb in his hand brings us to the early times of electric […]
March 14, 2010

Vienna

A short one. I arrived in Vienna some hours ago. Beautiful city! I am done with the presentation for tomorrow. The more I look at it the more I am convinced some people are not going to like it… I […]
March 13, 2010

There is still… Hope!

You may wonder why from time to time there is a post, in my blog, that is apparently not so much related to astronomy. Well, the lack of connection is indeed only apparent. The way I think and perceive the […]
March 1, 2010

Strong earthquake hits Chile

I guess that by today you all know about the catastrophic earthquake that struck Chile last Friday. My colleague, ESO astronomer Michael Dumke has already published a post about this. I have been living in Chile for two years, working […]
February 26, 2010

Willi Benz talks about extra-solar planets at ESO

Every week, on Thursday afternoons, ESO hosts the Munich Joint Astronomy Colloquium. This is organized by all the astronomical institutes in the Munich area (there are quite a few). The idea is to invite leading scientists to give an overview […]
February 25, 2010

Science Day at ESO

The staff of the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO) includes people coming from very different fields. Given the fact that we design, build and operate telescopes and instruments, our teams are composed by a mixture of mechanical, optical, electronic […]
February 2, 2010

Archaeoastronomy: reconnecting to reality. Part II

As I discovered in the initial phases of the study, the issue about the orientation of these sites had been already raised by other researchers. The first written reports (in the ’40s of last century) were mentioning that they all […]
January 25, 2010

Archaeoastronomy: reconnecting to reality. Part I.

I like astronomy very much at the level that I can say mine is not a profession, is rather a passion. But there are gray areas here and there. One of them, maybe the most important, is the level of […]
January 24, 2010

Late meetings. People who make beautiful things.

This has nothing to do with Astronomy (or maybe it does, but this it is not so important). I am just back from the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich, where David Fray gave a very impressive concert, playing Schubert and Bach. […]