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It's AG-Tagung time again: As every year in early autumn, the Astronomische Gesellschaft is beckoning the German astronomical Community. This year, 380 persons followed, which is a really good turnout by today's standards. Let's see how many we'll pull into to our booth: For the 19th time, GAVO is trying to get everyone there on board for using the Virtual Observatory – and contributing to it.
We are in the huge building of the mechanical engineering department, and before everything started, we had our booth ready:
To meet the challenge to fill this space with enthusiastic people, we again have a little VO-solvable riddle: this year's puzzler. At the booth, you can pick up what amounts to the full solution. Oh, and this year's prize is a towel sporting a photo of the recent total solar eclipse seen from the Ebro delta:
Sorry, you can't participate remotely. But if you're in Garching: Be sure to pick up a problem sheet [Update: they're gone. But we'll happliy give you hand-drawn lots if you want] and hand in your guess. And drop by at our splinter meeting, too.
Update (2026-09-10)
The towel went to Marburg again – congratulations! I have also posted the problem sheet, the hints, and a solution with a bit of a discussion of the result to the usual place, where you will also find the material when you come via VOTT.
Our splinter meeting on Tuesday was fairly well visited, too, even though Deutsche Bahn shook up the schedule (“Stellwerksstörung” between Nürnberg and München; I had mentioned the prolific use of Röck Döts around the AG meetings last year already). My contribution was a piece on blind discovery (in the context of the upcoming VODataService 1.3). If I may say so myself, I am still quite fond of my… shall we call it aphorism?
That's been the promise of the VO all along: Finding data you didn't know exists.
I was mildly surprised no discussion ensued about the proposed vocabulary for data sources (version of 2026-08-27; don't cite these with URLs containing dates outside of process banter). At the interop, we had quite a few controversies on what was called theory back then: shouldn't be called simulation, and is there a need to distinguish between the concepts now called abstract-model and concrete-model in the first place?
I, for one, can't wait to hear folks have a go at the new in-situ and laboratory concepts. I'll be the first to admit that the way we are defining things right now, even the venerable Viking biological experiments would be covered by both concepts, something that the Vocabulary guidelines forbid.
Well: this wasn't the last opportunity to work on this.