Swift 5-Year Conference Celebration

The Swift mission celebrated its 5th anniversary with a 3-day conference at the Pennsylvania State University. Since UVOT team had their own meeting prior to the conference, I spent the entire week in State College. This was an opportunity to sample the local restaurants including the Cozy Thai, the Indian Pavilion, the Golden Wok, Herwig's, and the Berkey Creamery. While returning from the Indian Pavilion, we passed the pig sculpture (photo below) celebrating the 100th year of State College. After the conference banquet Thursday night, many of us went to hear Maxwell Strait at the club Phyrst. The beer was cheap, the band was loud, the place was jumping,  cigarettes were found in surprising locations, and the band did not quit until 2 a.m. Their lead guitar player resembled the PI of one of the Swift instruments. Attendance was down at the start of the Friday morning session.

The final day of the conference was exactly 5 years after the launch of Swift, and several cakes (left photo) celebrated the occasion. For some reason, everyone wanted a picture (right photo).

Elihu Boldt Memorial Symposium

About 100 of Elihu Boldt's friends and colleagues gathered at the American Center for Physics in College Park, MD, on November 6, 2009, to celebrate his life and legacy. In addition to those of us from the X-ray Astrophysics Branch at GSFC (which Elihu founded), there were also friends from as far away as Italy and Mexico and several people who knew Elihu as a student at MIT. There were a series of short talks about the wide range of topics that Elihu worked on during his long career. I was honored to contribute a talk on Galactic Ridge X-ray Emission. Elihu first published a paper on the topic in 1969 and was still suggesting observations a couple of years ago. An agenda for the symposium and links to some of the talks are available here.