The 25th of April the second data release of the Gaia data was made available to the community in a spectacular press release. In short, approximately 1.3 billion sources with positions, parallaxes (proxies of distances) and proper motions (that describe how the stars move in the sky) were suddenly available to play with. I was not surprised when the Archive went down soon after the release. It was thrilling to live the release of the new data from the very beginning as it will constitute a big milestone in the history of Astronomy, and I am happy that we were able to use the data from the very first day.
That very day we were at the Space Telescope Science Institute attending to the 2018 Spring Symposium to which I contributed with a talk. It was a great experience to visit such a prestigious Institute and we had the chance of meeting a lot of interesting people and learn a lot from the different talks linked by the HR diagram topic.
Now, I am back in Madrid trying to process as fast as possible all the new Gaia information, preparing all the ideas we gathered in the previous months and playing with the new data to test what we can we do and how far can we aim for with the new information the Gaia satellite has provided us. It is important to understand all the caveats and peculiarities of the data and that might take some time. Hopefully for the next conference we are attending, The Olympian Symposium 2018, which is held Greece starting on the 28th of May we will be able to present our new final results based on the new data.