Back on the blog!

Hello again! It's been a while since I last posted here! Hopefully I will make up for it by posting more often from now on. This is something I actually want to do for various reasons, but never actually get to do it as I loose my self in lines of code trying to analyse some data. Firstly, by posting on this blog I will have the chance to share some of my research and ideas with the wider public, but also with some experts in the field (hopefully!). Consequently, I hope some readers will comment back to ask questions and/or point out flaws in what I am doing. Secondly, I hope to fuel more ideas both for myself and others. Writing about what I do will help me to better focus on my research, whilst readers can find inspiration (or the lack of it!). Lastly, I recently got awarded a fellowship (!!!) to carry out 3 years of research at the Institute for Astronomy at KU Leuven, and in my proposal there was a specific section describing this blog post, and how I envisioned it. Well, now that I got the award I guess I need to stick to my word ;)

What I hope to do is to post every week or two a brief summary of what I am (trying!) to work on, or understand. This can be research I am actively doing myself, other peoples research I find interesting, or as sometimes will happen, observing runs at telescopes. The idea is to make this very informal, and try to keep the content simple enough so that people without a dedicated training in astrophysics can follow, but not too much as to loose the essence of some interesting results. I really hope I can manage this with this blog, and additionally I hope some readers bumping into this blog will comment back to let me know: 1) what they think of it 2) how I can improve it and 3) help me understand why some of those twinkly objects in the sky behave the way they do! :)

As I have not posted here for a while, I will post a few things soon to try and catch up! First a brief introduction on the project I am meant to carry out here in Leuven, and then a brief summary of some of articles of mine which recently got published (or are in the process of). Hopefully this will then set the scene! Hope you enjoy the reading!

Ciao
Simo