Hello,

An interesting news was released today by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the international organization where I used to work in Chile. The E-ELT Site Selection Advisory Committee recommended the the Cerro Armazones in Chile as the future site of this large 45m-telescope.

This is definitely the banner for which I am the least qualified to write about since I am not a biologist. It is, however a very important part of the SETI Institute research that needs to be fully acknowledged and fully described.

If you are lucky and the sky is clear tonight, search for a red bright object in the Cancri constellation (Cancer), not too far from the stars Castor and Pollux in the Gemini constellation. As you may have already guessed, this is not a star but Mars, the fourth planet of the solar system.

It is getting more and more difficult to find a dark place, without night pollution and far from the smog of the cities, to be able to realize that we are part of a large barred spiral galaxy called the “Milky Way Galaxy”.  Seen from Earth, our galaxy will appear as a fuzzy arc in the sky commonly called the Milky Way and composed of 200-400 billion stars. This picture  taken by Tony Hallas, a mosaic of 24 frames taken in north of California, was shown in APOD on December 25 2009.

My Office building this morning at UC-Berkeley

Today I was not sure I will find my office at UC-Berkeley. As you can see on this picture it was not an easy task and I had to rely on my instincts and my phone GPS to find it.

Anyway, here I am thinking about what should be my priorities in the list of important tasks that I have to do today. Somehow this picture is depicting a bit how I feel about my work today.

A few days ago, the Obama administration revealed the requested budget for FY 2011 which includes the budget for federal agencies such as NASA and NSF. Almost simultaneously, the NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden described in a speech the future of NASA and US space exploration. This is an exciting time for us since we have been waiting for a year to get from the “new” administration a clear statement about the space exploration. 

Hello,

I am back from a long trip in Europe where I visited my collaborators at the IMCCE and at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon. I took a few days of vacations in the northern part of Moravia to enjoy the snow, see my inlaws and my family and teach skiing to my kids. I am back since Monday night, and obviouly I am completely jet-lagged. So the post today will be short and most informative for the people living in the Bay Area

I mentioned on this blog on several occasions (see “the first light“) the Kepler mission which aims at detecting exoplanets through the transit method (a.k.a the small attenuation of light due to the passage of the exoplanet between us and the host star). Last week, during the AAS  (say “double ‘A’ ‘S’”) conference, the Kepler team announced the discovery of the first 5 exoplanets.

Some news about this interesting target. As a reminder, it will make its close flyby on Wednesday January 13 at 12:46 pm UT (4:46 pm PST) so in a few hours, when it will pass at 122,000 km from Earth.

The new hype in our community: 2010AL30, a 10-60m asteroid will be passing at 1/3 the distance Earth-Moon on Jan 13. Interestingly because its period is 1 year, like Earth, it was suggested that it could be a man made object.