Sauntering Vaguely Downward

Earlier this month I was in Madrid for a meeting at ESAC, the European Space Astronomy Centre. It's actually about a half-hour drive from the centre of Madrid in the hilly countryside, since putting big satellite dishes in the middle of a city is generally neither wise nor effective.

ESAC is a much smaller site than ESTEC (in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, where I was at the end of May) and is less restrictive about on-site photography since little (or possibly no, I'm not sure) hardware development takes place there. Hence, pictures of dishes and spacecraft models!


One big dish and one small dish nestled amongst the trees at ESAC.

( More dishes & spacecraft models )

My hotel room was on the seventh floor, so I had some rather nice views over the city from my window.

At dawn.

( One more. )

After the meeting, the correct course of action was to go out for tapas and beer.


Scientists and beer. They haven't had much beer yet and are still looking a bit serious.

( Things get sillier. )

In case you were wondering what happened to me last week, I thought I'd show you the room in which I spent it. I have never given a talk in a room that was quite so grand.

The Sigüenza Parador has been on top of the hill overlooking the town in various castle-based forms since the twelfth century. The roof was destroyed during the Spanish Revolution. Reconstruction in its current form as a four-star hotel did not start until the late 1960s. It was completed in the mid-1970s. It's just a little bit impressive.

( +6 )