As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've spent the week in Paris attending an Easter school devoted to educating young astronomers on FIR/sub-mm imaging and spectroscopy, focussing especially on hands-on sessions which allow us to play with the physical data, learn how to extract sources, clean spectra and fit SEDs.
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| Adorning the Observatoire de Paris |
The School is taking place at the Centre international d'etudes pedagogiques (CIEP), which is a seminar centre on the outskirts of Paris, in a suburb called Sevres. It's a grand old building (formerly the Royal Porcelain Works) that is dedicated to education and languages. We're actually staying in the building, with en suite rooms on the third and fourth floors. The rooms are nothing spectacular, but are comfortable and clean with beautiful views. We also have a continental breakfast every morning, and a three course lunch served in the dining room. In my opinion that's one of the highlights of the day: we've been served copious amounts of Bordeaux with our meals, and often the food is very traditionally French: we've had confit du canard, faux fillet and numerous other tastinesses.
Everyday we've had lectures from 9am until 12.30pm, with a short coffee break in between. We've had a range of speakers: mostly French, but also a few people have made the journey from elsewhere. The lectures have ranged from summaries of the Planck and Herschel instruments and how they work, to Galactic focussed discussions on the structure and energetics of the Interstellar Medium. All of them were very well thought out, with a large deliverance of literature and information - I feel a lot more knowledgable about molecular and dust space physics now than I did a week ago.
In the afternoons, from 2pm until 6pm, we've had the hands-on sessions, where we split into groups and work on specific data. This has included a session on Planck imaging and data handling, sessions on Herschel, the handling of imaging data, and extracting structures from images to build SEDs and, these last couple of days: HIFI data with PDR models, and PACS and SPIRE spectra and models. These hands-on sessions are excellent: I've really enjoyed actually sitting there and having fun with raw data.
Of course, our days haven't ended at 6pm. Although we didn't do anything other than go for dinner on the Monday, on Tuesday we were treated to a trip to the Observatoire de Paris. This was a fantastic opportunity to see some of their historical collection as well as the beautiful architecture of the buidling, not to mention the all-important telescopes. I've shown a few pictures that I took along the way below: I personally was most impressed by the diary written by Johannes Kepler that they keep in their antiquities room.
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| Observatoire de Paris - front entrance |
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| Johannes Kepler's book/diary |
After we'd been given the grand tour, we were taken to a very impressive large room, where they had champagne and hors d'oeuvres laid out for us. We were left to chat and mingle there for the rest of the night, until they took us home around 11pm. My only disappointment was that there was no wine to drink - champagne gives me a hangover before it even makes me tipsy!!!
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| Observatory on the roof (where else?) |
This has been quite a long post, so I'm going to stop here and fill you in on the rest of my week when it's over (I fly back to Manchester tonight). Enjoy!!!
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