A very nice astronomy evening in spite of clouds

[VigdisVZ]

Hello SGL

Just wanted to share something that perked up the cloudy season.

Me, Gunnar and 20 other people from Uppsala Amatuer Astronomers had a meeting yesterday at the club house in Uppsala. The theme of the meeting was a lecture by Ulrike Heiter from the Uppsala University dept. of Physics and Astronomy.

She gave us a nice briefing on the new ESA project GAIA, a satellite that is going to map and catalogue a billion stars or so: http://sci.esa.int/s....cfm?fareaid=26

GAIA is going to gather astrometry and spectrography to find out the chemical composition and the flight path of stars to try and wind back the clock to see the chemical history of the galaxy, among other things.

She showed us some pictures and we could ask questions. When the picture of the CCD-cluster was shown, everyone was almost salivating from their mouths (106 CCDs of 4500x1966 resolution, the focal plane is 1000mm x 500mm).

After that we had coffee, sandwiches and spent a few hours talking about scopes and astronomy.

Thanks to Lars and the others for making this lecture happen!