Astronomy

Austin, TX (Jan 7, 2008)

I spent last week in Austin, for the American Astronomical Society meeting. The meeting was useful, as usual. Not for the science in itself (I didn’t have time to go to many talks) but rather for the opportunities to talk with my colleagues. I don’t want to go too deep in this right now, but after listening to the talk by the NASA director, the situation is not rosy. The last budget law, while it didn’t introduce as severe cuts as in other fields (like high energy physics, which has been almost obliterated) will put severe constraints to the activity of NASA. The consequences are still not clear, but the funding for the astrophysical sciences will suffer. The justification for the cuts given in the bill is the spending increase for Iraq and Afganistan, above the President requests. And this is a Democrats Congress... go figure... Anyway, my personal highlight of the meeting were the presentations of my two students, that were well received and I think will be useful for their respective future career.

About the title of the post, the day after I left for Austin the hard drive of the server where ornitorinko.org (which is in my basement) is hosted crashed. Given that Mayli was also away (in Chicago) the site (photoblog, but also my personal email) was down. I patched it up for now, but in the next few days I will need to change the disk (I already have a replacement because I had signs that the disk was failing) and reinstall the system. This will mean some more downtime, but I hope not too much.

The photo is the dome of the Texas Capitol, which is quite an amazing building.