The BRICS Astronomy Working Group Meeting 2023 was hosted by South Africa at SAAO‘s headquarters in Cape Town. The meeting ended on a high note with a Data Science Hackathon organized by Hack4dev and by the indefatigable Eslam Hussein in particular. Well done to the 30 participants and to the tutors who showed them the ways of data science applications in astronomy in a friendly and collaborative context. Per Astra ad Aspera;-)

The first meeting organized by the recently established UCT/UWC/NWU/UP Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy successfully came to a close last night with a braai at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). The Data Science Workshop held at UWC on 12/13 April 2016 brought together researchers from IDIA partners, affiliated research organisations and industry partners from IBM, SAP and SAS, to brainstorm research priorities and possible projects to be pursued within IDIA. If the enthusiasm (admittedly also fuelled by the abundant Shiraz) seen last night as SAAO was any guide, the South African Astronomical and Data Science community have embraced the goals of IDIA with gusto.

I’m off to beautiful & lively Bologna later today for “The Many Facets of Extragalactic Radio Surveys” conference. It’s been an eventful few months for Italian Radio-Astronomy, with their much-praised but eventually unsuccessful bid to host SKA‘s permanent headquarters, a re-organization of most radio-astronomy research & development under a new institute, and now a radio-astronomer called upon to be INAF‘s new president.

“The purpose of this meeting is to explore new scientific perspectives offered by modern radio surveys, focusing on synergies allowed by multi-frequency, multi-resolution observations. We will bring together researchers working on wide aspects of the physics and evolution of extra-galactic radio sources, from star-forming galaxies to AGNs and clusters of galaxies, including their role as cosmological probes. The organization of this conference has been inspired by the recent celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Northern Cross Radio Telescope in Medicina, whose pioneering B2 and B3 surveys provided a significant contribution to radio astronomical studies for many decades afterwards.”

I spent the week in beautiful and (in spite of forecasts) mostly sunny Dubrovnik attending the AstroInformatics 2015 conference and the BigSkyEarth collaboration meeting catching up on the latest applications of Computer Science to Astronomy, Earth Observations as well as other disciplines. While everyone is seemingly into Big Data these days, a lot of the techniques & tools have long been available and (some) astronomers are only slowly catching up, but thanks to well-established Open Standards and the largely Open Data Policy within the astronomical community, however, progress looks more rapid than in most other disciplines. Which is very good news considering that today’s ‘big’ astronomical datasets will soon be dramatically superseded by eminently data-intensive projects such as LSST and SKA. A number of conference attendees will be visiting Cape Town next year for an IVOA Interoperability Meeting, which will hopefully allow the South African community to establish or strengthen collaborations in this fledgling field.

PS : while it appears that signature scenes from a TV series which I’m told is VERY popular in some circles have long been shot in Dubrovnik and more than a few pointers were available to remind the casual visitor about it, to my fellow astronomers’ defence (for a change) I’m glad to say that conversations were remarkably free of any related nonsense!;-)

The more observationally inclined UWC-ers will be hosted by UCT tuesday-to-thursday this Easter week to attend the Netherlands / South Africa Radio Continuum Surveys Workshop co-funded by Netherlands’s NWO and South Africa’s NRF. LOFAR surveys and science and miscellaneous radio data reduction and analysis techniques are on show, looking forward to the MeerKAT and the SKA. I have just delivered my HELP talk and Jon is discussing stacking as I write. Oh, and there will be wine and cheese tonight as well as “theatrical dining” (!?) at  Star Dust tomorrow night. Too bad our illustrious leader who was going to visit us on the occasion was knocked out by a nasty bug and has thus not been able to join us. Get better soon!

Along with some UWC chums (i.e. Imogem, Kim & Mario) I spent a very pleasant (well, at least until I got a flu;/) week in Sintra (Portugal) attending the “Back at the edge of the Universe” conference. The meeting was devoted to discuss astronomers’ present and future studies of the high-redshift Universe, including their attempts at detecting the Universe’s ‘First Light’, i.e. the first galaxies and black holes to have formed after the Big Bang, and assessing their impact on the reionization of  the Universe. This followed a previous gathering from 9 years ago organized on the same grounds, and the meeting was thus also a chance to take stock of the substantial progress  made in tackling these questions over the last decade. The long science sessions in beautiful Sintra were made all the more pleasant by the terrific home team led by Jose Afonso and Portugal’s newly established Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and by frequent generous helpings of Bacalau & Porto, and perhaps unsurprisingly everybody is now hoping to get a chance to make it back here for another conference much sooner than in 9 years time. We’ll see about that.