Back home…

…. in soggy London, and I have to admit, I’m rather zonked. ESLAB was tremendous fun, full of great talks and was fantastic to meet up with colleagues across the Herschel project both scientifically and socially (and boy, do astronomers know how to knock back the booze…..). It’s such an intense week though – early starts plus around 12 talks a day – that basically it’s just overload central by the end of the week. As a consequence, it was nice to head home – even to screaming, hyperactive almost 3 and almost 1 year old kids and a rather frazzled wife.

A number of travel firsts for me – first trip on Eurostar, and first time in Belgium and Holland. Very impressed with Eurostar, amazingly quick to Brussels from St. Pancras. Not quite so impressed with the Belgian railway system (rather slow, and our train to Rotterdam noticeably sped up once we crossed the border into Holland), as our train back to Brussels from Rotterdam was cancelled – luckily as we had the Eurostar connection to make, we were bumped up to the Thalys high speed train to Brussels Midi, and made our connection just in time. Very much like the Thalys trains – definitely will use them again. Rather a step up in class from First Great Western, and everyone’s favourite, Irish Rail…..

An enjoyable, yet tiring, few days – time to sit on my backside for the weekend before more (UK based) train journeys next week… it’ll give me time to digest the UK election results/fallout, the football I’ve missed (and will watch) and the mad news that Ireland will be contributing $1.3 billion to the Greek bailout. Did we find it behind the sofa?

Space telescopes… and hands-off fun with an 8-m telescope

Post-paternity leave (a little girl, now 8 weeks old, if you’re wondering), it’s back to the world of astronomy.  I work on a mission called Herschel, a far-IR  observatory launched by the European Space Agency  (you can find the blog we write at http://herschelmission.wordpress.com/).  Amongst other  things, I work on mission planning for one of the instruments, a  photometer/spectrometer  called SPIRE,  and as a  result, I’m spending a good portion of my week in the ops room for SPIRE  on duty as the mission  planner, in charge of putting together  the list of  observations to be uploaded to the spacecraft for SPIRE observing days. Fun stuff, but since the commute is  2.5hrs each way (on a good day), it’s bloody exhausting doing this a few days in a row.

And two months of this yet to go, as we’re past the commissioning stage, and have moved into the performance verification stage -  we’re tweaking the settings of the instruments to find their optimum performance level. A lot of work ahead,  but as my wife puts it, time is flying on this already. Before we know it, it’ll be regular operations time…. and then the real bonanza will begin.

One nice extra bit of news is that I got time on the Gemini  South 8-m telescope, to look at a nearby heavily star forming galaxy called  NGC  1705  in  the  mid-IR. Just a few hours  of observing time,  but it’s already done. The joys of having it done in queue mode (the missus would have strung me up if I told her, “Honey, I’m off to Chile for an observing run. Enjoy the 2 year old and the new born!“

Well, the data to arrived via FTP this afternoon, and will get cracking on it. Once I’ve got some breath to spare, of course. And after a fair bit of sleep.

The next fun bit is writing  the follow-up proposal….

Gemini South