Ok I was too tired last night (or rather, early this morning) to complete my report from Amsterdam/EHT “Pajama Central Command” outpost, sorry to leave the ~10 people reading this in suspense! It turned out to be quite a harrowing situation. Shep (the PI) referred to it as a more typical “angst-ridden” decision, because the earlier nights had been pretty clear what to do. By the time we reconvened at 1:00am EU time, the good news was that the weather at LMT had begun to stabilize, and SMT was still a bit marginal but good to go. But then there was an O-ring problem on one of the helium dewars…

It’s a tense night here at the Amsterdam/EHT “Pajama Central Command” outpost! All sites have remarkably good weather except SMT (marginal but not terrible) and LMT (worse than marginal but potentially variable). The team decided to do a provisional “GO”, but are reconvening at 1:00am Europe time to see what things look like then. Given the Chandra and NuSTAR coverage I am really hoping the LMT weather improves. It’s a bit like watching a toaster, I keep checking the site opacity monitor and it’s very variable, but higher than the sustained 0.5 we want…

I am really excited, I get to participate in the go/no go decision tonight with EHT Central Command!! We’re going to decide if tomorrow is the big day for Sgr A* (remember, my favorite black hole), when we might observe for something like 10 hours. What is extra cool is that we have some overlapping coverage with three X-ray satellites in orbit (Chandra, NuSTAR, Swift), as well as hopefully also the VLT, which is the premier European-run optical/IR facility at the moment, in Chile. It is very hard to get so many instruments to look at the same object at the same time, so if all goes well we’ll have…

So the first EHT run last night has gone really well, though of course there were a few technical issues. I really enjoyed being on the Slack channel and following the communications in realtime from all the stations across the globe. Not to mention the snarky comments (people competing between SPT and LMT for being a “big ungainly sail” when it comes to wind disrupting pointing accuracy…who knew??). But if that weren’t enough, the black hole X-ray binary Cyg X-3 decided to have a massive flare!! So at the 11th hour, with the folk having been up all night, there was a flash decision to point 3 telescopes (JCMT-SMA-SMT) of…

I just got back from a month at UT Austin as a visiting Tinsley Scholar, which was great. Two years ago I went for three months as a Tinsley Professor, and got to bring part of my research group with me, but this time was a smaller scale visit. I started two projects that I had been discussing for awhile, but now these have (I hope) legs. One is together with Prof. John Kormendy, and is being led by my former postdoc Dr. Rich Plotkin, now a senior fellow at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and also includes Dr. James Miller-Jones, from the same institute. This paper involves a relationship…

The new group has arrived as of this week (woohoo!) and I will be adding some information about that as soon as possible, but in the meantime I thought I would just mention some news, which is that as of last month I have been elected to be a member of the Science Council of the international Event Horizon Telescope project. This project is an ingenious idea to use the entire Earth diameter as a huge baseline for a telescope, using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). Why do this? Because the larger your telescope is, the better you see, and in particular, the finer details you see.…

Ok, I realize that my language here is a bit politically incorrect, but sometimes you just can’t say it any other way. Prof. Fiona Harrison kicks ass! She’s professor and the current department chair at the Astronomy/Physics Dept at Caltech, one of the top universities in the world. But more importantly, she designed a friggin’ space X-ray observatory, that had one of the most complicated launch manoeuvres possible, and it has worked so spectacularly that even as a small “cheap” mission it’s revolutionised my field! Today she was awarded a big prize by the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). Here’s the motivation, but it just makes me proud of…

I was thrilled to find out last week (around the time of the big Gravitational Wave detection!!) that I was awarded a Vici grant from the Dutch National Research Organization (NWO), basically 1.5 million Euros to hire 3 PhD students and 2 postdocs over the coming 5 years! The title of my proposal was ““From micro- to megascales: understanding how black holes shape the local universe”, and focuses on how black holes release energy from stuff they gravitationally capture, and dump it back into their surroundings. There’s a nice description on the press release from our science faculty here. So anyway we had our annual PhD recruiting last week and…

NEW:  Due to rain we are postponing this event until next week, probably Thursday or Friday 20 or 21 August.   Stay tuned by checking the website if you were interested.  I heard it sold out so I’m pretty excited to have a good crowd, but maybe with the date change there will be some cancellations… Thanks to the folk at Non-Fiction, who organise many cultural events around Amsterdam, I will be participating in an exciting late night talk on top of the Oude Kerk (the Old Church), one of the oldest structures in the heart of Amsterdam! Non-Fiction are curating a series of cultural events in August and September…