I just returned from a conference in Granada Spain on Stellar Pulsation, I took some pictures that you can see here. The conference was very interesting, discussing almost all aspects of pulsating variable stars, the city was amazing, with clear skies and 30 degree heat and no, absolutely no humidity. The only problem was getting there.
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Last month, I attended a conference on binary stars and planetary transits, where there was a lot of discussion about light curves, binary star physics, some great talks on planet transits and exoplanet atmospheres. The conference was hosted by the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Science in Tatranská Lomnica, Slovakia. Granted that I had never really heard of the place beforehand, I am glad I visited. It is a beautiful place with sharp mountains surrounding expansive plains. There are not too many people so it is also pretty quiet.
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Back in May, I visited Naples for a conference, described in this post. While there I also got the chance to visit the ruined city of Pompeii. Pompeii was a Roman settlement almost 2000 years ago when the volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted and showered the city in ash, suffocating the citizens and burying the city. The eruption was so strong that some estimate that the top of the volcano was blown off and the height of Mount Vesuvius was halved.
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On my recent trip to Lijiang, my wife and I travelled through north-western Yunnan and visited a park where we hiked along the hillside to see the Mingyong glacier perched on the side of a mountain. Our visit was part of the tour I described in a previous post. The tour group arrived as the base of the mountain early in the day, the last day of the tour before we returned to Lijiang. I think we were all a little tired for the hour or two hike to the glacier but luckily we could ride mules up and down the hill.
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After I returned to Germany from China, I turned right back around and hopped on a plane to Naples for a conference on the Cosmic Distance Scale. The goal of this conference was to understand how well astronomers can measure the distances to far away stellar objects and galaxies and use this information to measure the rate of expansion of the universe, denoted by Hubble’s Constant H₀. By more precisely measuring the expansion, it is hoped that we can better understand the structure of the universe, and the physics of the universe such as dark energy. Read More...

As part of my trip to China, my wife and I travelled from Lijiang to the northwestern part of Yunnan province, near the border with Tibet. The region itself is a Tibetan Autonomous County, populated by ethnic Tibetans. We travelled from Lijiang to Shangri-La and then on to a small town near Melee Mountain.

The first stop was a visit to the Yangtze River called Tiger Jump Gorge, where it flows from the region and builds up into the great river that flows through China. It is a remarkable sight, the river has carved out a narrow and deep gorge over thousands of years. Read More...

I returned a week ago from a couple of conferences, one in Lijiang, China, and one in Naples, Italy. I’ll write about the latter conference in a later post. The conference in Lijiang was titled The 9th Pacific Rim Conference on Stellar Astrophysics and featured a number of presentations and posters on various aspects of stellar astronomy from star formation to Cepheids to black holes. Read More...