The first day of NAM 2005 Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Today is the first day of the National Astronomy Meeting here in Birmingham, but while the conference runs till Friday I'm only here today and tomorrow. Unfortunately I don't have the time to hang around just for interests sake, as I'm off to the VOEvent Workshop in Pasadena next week, so I'm doing a hit and run on the relevant sessions.


Dave Giaretta talking about Starlink and the VO
Following plenary talks on AGN, by an old friend of mine Chris Done, and on LIGO by Peter Saulson I headed off to the Grid Applications & e-Science parallel session where I presented my talk on eSTAR and heterogeneous telescope networks. Unfortunately I hadn't really had enough time to spend thinking about what I was going to say, so it wasn't really the best talk I've ever given...

After a brief break for lunch, and to burn a copy of the Mac OS X port of the Starlink Classic software to DVD for someone, I ventured to the afternoon plenary session which kicked off with Alex Szalay from John Hopkins talking about the potential of the Virtual Observatory. The second plenary talk was by Ofer Lahav talking about data compression, classification and parameter estimation.


Alex Szlay talking about the Virtual Observatory
I must admit to being somewhat surprised that talks about the VO made it into the "mainstream" conference, although thinking about it the attendance at the e-Science parallel session was up on last year as well. Interesting!

I'm now heading off to the parallel session on novel algorithms for astronomy...