Friday, August 14, 2009

IAU-GA summary

So, I've been out the last two weeks, part of it spent on the IAU-GA in Rio. I've actually only spent the first week and the first day of the second week.


First my idea was to write daily on what I've seen there, but it was impossible, not only because of the meeting, but because of the "after meeting" hehehehehe


One of the very interesting things of this meeting, held in my home country was seeing a lot of people I haven't seen since before I left to Germany almost five years ago. Since then lot's of things have changed, like my long hair is gone, my need for glasses is gone, so I had to re-introduce myself to many colleagues. No problems with it.


On the scientific side, on the first three day I attended the joint discussion on Dark Matter in Elliptical Galaxies. Interesting topic, sometimes too technical. I would highlight here the talk from Tomaso Treu and the one from Richard Ellis.


The following two days I attended to the joint discussion on Diffuse Light, the one I had my talk and appointed myself. It was very good!! Very good indeed. Very nice talks from Ann Zabludoff, John Feldmeier, Pat Durrell and (of course) Claudia Mendes de Oliveira, just to mention a couple of them. One and a half days of discussion worth seeing.


We had the opportunity to openly discuss issues like contaminations, error estimates, modeling problems and so on. Also had the opportunity to have interesting conversations with some of the people and specially with Ann Zabludoff, a conversation that was postponed from the last IAU-GA in Prague.


On the following monday, nice talks from Richard Ellis (again) and Abraham Loeb and a nice invited discourse from Simon White.


On the weekend the city planetarium took 300 of the participants to a soccer match in Maracanã, Flamengo x Corinthians (my favorite team). It was fun to take all this people there. The match was not that good and my team lost 1x0 ... grrrr :-)))


After that somedays at my parents, to enjoy their company and to solve some problems related to my portuguese citizenship and to lots of things I left at their place five years ago and never really took care of it. This time I managed to overview half of it and two produce a large amount of trash! Yep, old receipts from telephone, electric power and things like that, lot's of useless paper and several other things. Important things now properly organized and archived.


Basically that. Now I'm at the plane (just gonna post that on monday night) flying home to my family. I miss them badly :-) Trips are not ending. One day at home and 12 days in the south of France/north of Spain are coming with a lot of beach and bike rides for the three of us!!


So I'll probably be back on posting in the first week of september.


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