I’m currently sitting in the ESA ESLAB conference in Noordwijk, Holland, listening to a barrage of new results from Herschel. It’s been an extraordinarily busy few months for us all, finally sitting down with our first science-quality datasets from the various instruments on Herschel, and reducing them/analysing the results, and finally, writing the first papers.
Most of us have had their Science Demonstration papers accepted by the ‘Astronomy & Astrophysics’ journal – generally, the responsible space agency (ESA in this case) works with one of the professional astronomy journals to publish short papers in a ‘special edition’ of the journal, which is given over entirely to those results. The fruit of those labours are being presented at Noordwijk this week – in my case, my work on the Dwarf Galaxy Survey was quite pleasantly namechecked and shown by the project’s PI, so I was quite understandably chuffed. For those of us working on the instrument teams, the last few years of suppressing our own scientific output to get the instruments working has been well worth it – the bonus is that we get to be part of large consortia, doing mind-blowing, cutting edge science as a result.
One of the nice bonuses of conferences is the social aspects – dinner and trips to the pub, after long, long days in the conference hall, hits the spot quite nicely! Good people, good company, and great science – not a bad combination, at all.
Only one last day left for the ESLAB conference – to follow it, keep an eye on the Herschel mission blog (which I contribute to), or on Twitter, using the #eslab2010 tag.
(I was going to blog on the interesting post regarding scientists and data access to the community at large at the Galaxy Map blog, but Dave Clements already did a good job in responding. It’s a worthwhile discussion – check it out.
