The AAS Comes to Boston

This week, the American Astronomical Society held its bi-annual meeting in the fair city of Boston. Since those of us involved with Chandra spend most of our time on the other side of the river (meaning Cambridge), this is a chance to expand our horizons ever so slightly.

Of course, the big bonus of the AAS meeting is the ability to hear talks and mingle with people who don’t work at our institution. It’s a chance to catch up with old colleagues and meet new ones. In a world increasingly dominating by electronic communication, there’s something irreplaceable about actually sitting across from someone in person.

The folks involved with Chandra have been very busy this week. On the press front, we released this gorgeous new image of the Carina Nebula. This one image does not do justice the huge endeavor that was undertaken on this project. The new Carina dataset represents some 1.2 million seconds – or nearly 14 days – of Chandra observing time. That’s quite a lot, especially when you consider that many Chandra observations are in the tens of thousands of seconds.

Also this week at the AAS, we held a “meeting-in-a-meeting” to discuss some of the highlights of the Chandra mission over its past dozen years. These sessions covered some of the best stuff Chandra has done – and continues to do – over the course of the mission. We’re thankful to the scientists who made the trek to Boston to help this meeting and the larger AAS one such a success.

-Megan Watzke, CXC