The May-June 2016 Leg of the World Stupendathon Tour

The Vatican Observatory refractor, which is on the roof of the Papal Summer Palace in Castel Gandolfo.

OK, let's see if we can get this going.

I have a long trip coming up, albeit one that has us (mostly) staying in the same place. Jennifer and I have the pleasure of being guest lecturers at the Vatican Observatory Summer School in Albano, Italy, about a half hour south of Rome. The school runs the month of June, we're currently planning to spend some time prior to the school in Zürich and about a week after the school doing some additional touring (right now we're thinking of Vienna).

The students will have access to quite the library. This is something we pulled off the shelf on a previous visit to the Vatican Observatory HQ in Castel Gandolfo.

This will not be our first trip to Italy, nor the first time as the guests of the Vatican Observatory.  We visited in 1996 and stayed in Castel Gandolfo in-between conferences in Versailles and Berlin. I also had the pleasure of a visit to Rome in 2011 and a visit to Castel Gandolfo as part of that trip. Finally, I was in Rome last year, as well as the nearby town of Frascati.

I don't know what our schedules will be like there, but I at least hope to post on occasion.  I also do plan to talk about some past trips here once I get into the blogging routine!

So What's All This Then

I've been a lot of places.  The map up there represents most of the places I've been in my life, however briefly.  I enjoy travel, and have been fortunate enough to have been able to do a lot of it both for work (I'm an astronomer) and for pleasure. Faced with a massive amount of travel in 2015 I started referring to the various trips as the "World Stupendathon Tour" on Twitter.  2016 looks to have a similar amount of travel, and so I figured I'd start this blog to share some of the thoughts that are too long for Twitter. I'm not sure what I'll do with the blog, though I imagine it'll be a mix of what I'm up to and past trips. Maybe a post on my thoughts about Johannesburg followed by pictures from Singapore or something. I don't currently have a place to talk about science (I do have another blog, but it's for music/poetry), it's possible I'll have some science posts as well.

Anyhow, welcome to the blog.  Let's see what happens.