As many of you might already know, the first solar eclipse for the year is on January 15th. This will be visible in Northern Sri Lanka, a part of the country that was not accessible to public until recently due to the end of a 30 year long civil war.

First of all wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2010. Hope everyone had a good vacation. I am officially still on vacation in Melbourne. We have been enjoying many sunny days here (some days bit too hot). We spend Christmas at the beach and toured bit of the Aussie outback with friends. It is such a nice feeling to be among family and friends after being so far from them for so long. After meeting with some of my high school friends it is amazing to realize that we have all “grown up” and how quickly time flies.

Note I am still blogging under ESO but I will not be at ESO after the end of February. So where to next? I do have a Marie Curie fellowship to work at Lund University in Sweden. Its prestigious and hard to get and may well be a turning point in my professional life, but again we will be far from home and right now we (especially my kids) are enjoying living in Melbourne so much to even consider moving overseas again. Add to that my husband recently got a permanent job here. So going to Sweden would mean splitting the family up between the opposite ends of the planet! The family vs. career battle continues on in 2010!

This will be my last post from Germany as we are just about to leave the country…

Yes, its finished. It my favorite word right now. Finished, complete, and I don’t have to think about it anymore

I am posting to let you all know of an astronomy event on the 25th of September in Kandy, Sri Lanka. The official site is at http://starparty2009.com/.

As the title says this post is about getting a job as an astronomer, and my current job hunt. Most of the time before landing a permanent job in astronomy research, you would need to get a university degree in something related to science, then a graduate degree - honours or masters and then likely also a PhD in astronomy or related field. OK we did all that, so now what?

The last few weeks I spent working on a new dataset given to me by a fellow colleague at ESO. It was an unexpected offer and I was initially unsure if I should take on the extra work which is being led by someone else (given the huge amount of work I already have on my own). Anyway I decided to take it up and it turnout to produce some very exciting results!!

As most of you know the International Astronomical Union (IAU) general assembly (GA) started this week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For both work and family reasons I had earlier decided not to attend.

Its been over a month since my last post. Nothing special going on, its just I am in the middle of the nitty gritty analysis part of the projects I mentioned in the last post. My preliminary results were encouraging, however once you start to dip deeper, we see the other effects which require even further investigations. Its frustrating right now to keep re-analysing and double/triple checking everything, but once I have done this I will have a sound and accurate result. So later if someone challenges my results I can say that I already checked!

I have been extremely busy the past couple of weeks. In an earlier post in April I said I will try to get a past data set studied and written up into a article in a few months. Well since that post, two months have passed and things have been moving along. I do have some “preliminary” results now, but still along way to go to finish up the project.