Back home

Sunset at La Jolla, a few kilometers north of San Diego. The American Astronomical Society meeting ended on Thursday afternoon, and we went north along the shore to have a look at the Pacific Ocean. We stopped in La Jolla, which looks like a touristic city with a nice seaside walk and beaches. We arrived there when the sun was setting, so I made a few ocean sunset photos, among which the one above with a long (15 seconds) exposure. The sun had already set, so the main source of illumination was a sliver of moon (high above the horizon, outside the frame). I don’t know who is the lady on the rocks, but I am happy she was there (very still for the whole time) because she gives a human scale to the image. I really did only a small color correction to the photo: the scenery was really this blue. Mayli likes it to the point that she is using this photo as a background for her laptop.

While we were at la Jolla we also had the unexpected encounter with seals that were resting on another beach. They were very cute, fatty docile animals sleeping one next to the other, some of them with their bulging belly up (we were told that many of them were pregnant). It was already quite dark, but I did manage to take some shots, so I will post a few photos of the la Jolla seals later on on this blog.

Later on we went to Old San Diego (which is not really that old, it looks more like a recently developed touristic and restaurant area) for dinner. One of us knew about a fish restaurant which turned out to be really excellent (albeit on the expensive side, but not too expensive compared to other lesser restaurant I went this week). I don’t remember now the name of the restaurant: Jennifer if you remember it add a comment will you?

I am quite happy about how the meeting went, even though, as usual, it was exhausting. I am not sure how many people actually participated in it (probably of the order of a couple thousands) but according to the organizers it was the largest ever. This means that the numbers of papers presented was so high that I couldn’t really see all the posters I was interested in. Some of the plenary sessions were very interesting, and I especially enjoyed Martin Rees lecture on Cosmology, the session about the Creationism vs. Evolutionism and the talk about the progresses of the two little martian rovers (given by Steven Squyers, which “starred” in the special PBS programs on the Mars missions, and seems like a little kid genuinely entusiast of his wonderful toys).

Now I have a few days to rest at home (fortunately on Monday is vacation here in US - Martin Luter King’s day), before leaving again for my observing run in Tucson, Arizona.