German Class

Simone Pott was kind enough to offer a german class for beginners! Quoting her words:

"The class will be for beginners i.e. A1 level and we will start with the book Berliner Platz 1. Moreover, I might include parts of the soap opera www.hauptstrasse117.de. That is a soap opera designed for people who learn German.  I intend to hold the classes on Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m for 1.5 hs."

So you are all encouraged to attend! This is a great opportunity to kick off your proficiency German  ;)  

So the class wil start on May 26th, will be Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m for 1.5 hrs and the recommended book is "Berliner Platz 1".

New IMPRS office

Dear all,

the IMPRS team finally has a home! From now on, it will be residing  in office E2.07 of the new wing of the MPI building. The telephone number of the coordinator is (0)228 525 - 217 and of the Secretary (starting on June 3)  (0)228 525 - 456.

Now, here are some hints about the calendar and our blog to make your life slightly easier.

1. Calendar:

The calendar for our activities is sitting at:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=imprs%40mpifr.de&ctz=Europe/Berlin 

If you are using mac os x, you can subscribe to this with your iCal and get the calendar refreshed automatically. In order to do so just use the following URL in the Calendar>Subscribe

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/imprs%40mpifr.de/public/basic.ics

2. blog:

The current blog can be accessed either directly (as you do right now) or via rss feed. The rss feed can be used in all sorts of ways. Among them, you could create an account in your thunderbird email client and receive them as emails. For that do:

File>New>Account>RSS News & Blogs and use the address:

http://imprs-mpifr.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Now, all these things you also access from my website:

www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/eangelakis/Emmanouil_Angelakis_Home_Page/IMPRS.html  

 

The final visit to dear, old friend: STS-125 launch on Monday

Dear all,

the final space shuttle service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, STS-125 (Atlantis), is scheduled for the coming Monday, 11. May, 2:01 EDT = 18:01 UTC = 20:01 CEST according to NASA Mission information:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/hst_sm4/index.html

The mission goals are the replacement of old gyroscopes, batteries and others as well as the installation of two new instruments, namely the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, a high-sensitive UV spectrograph, and the Wide Field Camera 3, that will image in a wide range of wavelengths including IR, visibla and UV.

The most complicated task for the crew, however, will be the repairs of some partially broken instruments since those were never designed to be disassambled in space. Some  more info:

NASA:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/hst_sm4/overview.html

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125

The launch will probably webcast on NASA-TV,

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

This mission will be especially critical since in the case of a heat shield damage (like that one that caused the loss of space shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003) there will be no safe harbour in space The ISS is on a completely different orbit. In that unlucky case a spare shuttle (Endeavour) may be launched (hopefulle undamaged!) to rescue the Atlantis crew unless the damage can be fixed in situ.

Therefore, good luck to the crew of Atlantis!

Please also mind the launch of Herschel/Planck on Thursday, 14. May (Friedrich Wyrowsky already announced the Herschel launch party). The launch of the two space observatories on an Ariane 5ECA rocket is scheduled for 14. May, 13:12 UTC = 15:12 CEST. Webcast:

http://www.videocorner.tv/index.php?langue=en

Cheers,

Ingo Thies

-- 

==========================================

Ingo Thies

Argelander-Institut fuer Astronomie (AIfA)

Sternwarte, University of Bonn

Auf dem Huegel 71, D-53121 Bonn, Germany

Tel : +49 (0)228 73-3659

Mail: ithies@astro.uni-bonn.de 

MPI Invitation International Dinner

we would like to invite you to an international dinner on May 20th at 7 p.m. in the local canteen. The idea is that everyone prepares a typical meal from his/her home country. Please let me know whether you will attend.

Simone