It’s been a while, I must admit – life has been a tad busy with work on Herschel, with performance verification pretty much done (apart from one instrument) and science demonstration kicking off. It’s been pretty much non-stop since August, with me travelling quite a bit up and down to Oxfordshire for the majority of the week. So, unsurprisingly, not a lot of time has been free to update the blog, sadly.
For the last week, I’ve actually had some time off – I’m currently in Ireland on a bit of a busmans holiday. I came over to give a talk to the Irish Astronomical Society on Herschel last Monday night – we got a crowd of 25 or so up to Dunsink Observatory for the talk, and I think it went pretty well. It was odd being back at Dunsink, as I’d spent 18 months as a post-doc earlier in my career and had not been back in the 5+ years since.
The observatory is pretty much abandoned now – the internal politics and restructuring within the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies led to the academics moving into the Dublin city centre, leaving the Observatory empty. Now Irish science isn’t in the healthiest of states – astronomy in particular – but to leave a crown jewel like the Dunsink site to rot is unforgivable. The history of the site (luminaries such as Hamilton and Schrodinger worked there) plus the wonderful historical instruments (a 12″ Grubb refractor in particular) make it a *prime* site for a superb outreach facility for Irish astronomy and science in general. Apart from the sterling efforts of the IAS, the opportunities for using the site for science outreach are being sadly ignored by an increasingly short-sighted parent body and penny-pinching Government department – this sort of thing would *not* happen elsewhere in Europe.
Instead, it is left there to rot. And sadly, that’s the way things happen in Ireland. It’ll be only when the Dunsink site is beyond saving that the powers that be will get up off their arses…. and then it’ll be too late.
