FWIS3

At a conference this week in the northern Netherlands this week to celebrate a professor's retirement- and the speaker just said about him and the retiree, "and back then, of course, we were working for Oort in Leiden..."

Wait, THAT Oort?!

Not like Dutch astronomy is a huge community so guess overlap is expected amongst bigwigs, but still, I thought that was neat. (Also note for those who aren't aware, Oort was actually a famous radio astronomer in his day- it's kind of an odd twist that he's now most famous for something completely out of his field, in proposing the Oort cloud.)

Very cool. Whenever I do planetarium programs I take people through the Oort Cloud, describing it, and displaying the label. So thousands of people around here know of him.

Btw should mention that the conference I was at was also interesting because the fellow whose "retirement" it was celebrating (he's really not, he just got a 5 year major grant type retirement) is very likely to be the first Nobel laureate I know personally- he's in charge of the team dedicated to finding the Epoch of Reionization signal, and they are really close per results shown at the conference (we pretty much all signed up to go in part because we wanted to tell future generations we were there when they announced it type thing).

Also the more I go to these sorts of conferences the more btw I realize I work for a pretty famous guy in astronomy- I've yet to meet someone who didn't know my adviser and think highly of him.