The 25th of April the second data release of the Gaia data will be presented to the community. That day we will be at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore attending to the Symposium “The 21st Century H-R Diagram: The Power of Precision Photometry”, in which I will give a talk about what we have done, and plan to do, with the Gaia data. This will be a great opportunity to share with the community our knowledge of using the new astrometric values and to learn what other people around the world have in mind about the same subject.

Another good new is that I applied for admission to the Spanish Astronomical Society which annual meeting will be held this year in Salamanca in July. We will attend this meeting and hopefully we will present fresh new results obtained with the new set of data.

These months have been pretty cold in Madrid (and apparently in the whole Europe) but despite of that I managed to go to Leeds for a week in mid February and come back with some nice work done. I might go again soon after the 25th of April for fine tuning the way we approach the Gaia data.

The Proceedings of the “Star Formation in Space and Time” Symposium, for which we contributed with a poster, are now public while the ones from the “Astrometry and Astrophysics in the Gaia Sky” Symposium are soon to come.

But, what is a transfer viva? Is an oral exam where the student has to answer questions about the work they have been doing for 10 months since the beginning of the PhD. This represents an important step in this journey because the outcome of this determines whether you can continue or not in the program. I am very happy to say that I passed my transfer viva and officially I am a 2nd  year PhD student at the University of Leeds.

Moreover, before the end of  last year, I attended two interesting workshops that took place in ESAC, Spain.  One was the Third ASTERICS School, the focus for this was The Virtual Observatory (VO). In this, I learned about how to use different astrophysics tools, such as Topcat, Aladin, VOSA, etc.; and apply the knowledge in a scientific case. The ESAC DATA ANALYSIS & STATISTICS workshop was the second one I attended, where I learned about fundamental topics in statistics and data analysis from a group of experts in the field.

Finally, I helped my English advisor to create a short video presentation about the need for writing skills when doing research. This will be used in the near future as material for a course given by the Language centre of the University of Leeds. Also, I had the opportunity to show physics demos to groups of kids and the general public in the IOP outreach event, Stargazing Live 2018.

Every day is a new experience in the life of a PhD student.

A new year of ideas and expectatives begins while we are still gathering the results produced at the end of 2017. Rene Oudmaijer, my PhD main supervisor, came to visit ESAC at the end of December what resulted in a few days of intense hands-on work. Together we finished outlining the first segment of the project and planned for the future. Now the next milestone is Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2), planned for the second half of April, when we will face the new technical difficulties arising from a new catalogue. Therefore, the more we can do beforehand the better.

Shortly before Rene’s visit I attended, together with Alice, the ESAC Data Analysis and Statistics Workshop. We learnt a lot about Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning and Python programming in statistics. The idea is to implement the new knowledge to the project as soon as possible, as it will be of the utmost importance in order to describe the results that will be obtained with DR2.

It is quite important to have an impact on the community. Hence, this January I presented the work I did during my first year of PhD at the Journal Club of the Astrobiology Center in Madrid. We plan to go to the Olympian Symposium in Greece at the end of May and, once in the deep Spanish summer, we will go to the national Spanish astronomy meeting in Salamanca.

Nonetheless, the event that made me happier was the public talk I gave about star formation at the Isabel the España college residence. It was heart-warming to see the reaction of the general public and the interest aroused.

Many things have happened since my last blog entry. We went to the Francesco’s Legacy, Star Formation in Space and Time conference in Florence, where both Alice and myself presented a poster and Rene gave a talk. The conference itself was very instructive and we had a great time in Florence.

Short after that, I left Leeds to start my secondment in Madrid. It was sad to leave Leeds after 10 months working there, say goodbye to my peers and colleagues and move to another town. However, the people at the ISDEFE & European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) welcomed me very nicely and I am extremely pleased in my new office. Nonetheless, it was not so long until I had to go back to the UK, at the beginning of July we went to the National Astronomy Meeting in Hull and by the end of the month I had to go back to Leeds University for my first year viva, which I successfully passed.

After summer holidays, we had the chance to know Liverpool as the Northern Star Formation meeting was hold there. The meeting was very cosy and enjoyed by all the assistants, so we agreed it will be repeated next year in Manchester.

That was not the last trip, the first week of October we went to observe to the William Herschel Telescope at La Palma. It was a fantastic experience; we learnt and enjoyed a lot in the three nights we stayed on top of the mountain. I am really looking forward to go observing again soon. It is easy to forget that stars are really above us to be observed after so many days looking at numbers on the screen.

Between trips and trips I keep working in my new office in Madrid, learning the most out of the new environment of astronomers, engineers and archive people. I truly think I am going to have a productive and enjoyable time in this secondment in Madrid.

This last month, Rene Oudmaijer and myself attended the IAU Symposium 330, Astrometry and Astrophysics in the Gaia sky in Nice (24-28th April). They were five days of talks from many different fields in astronomy with the Gaia project in common. It was very useful to see how the Gaia DR1 data can be used in such a variety of ways, and gave us many ideas to implement in our project. It was also very useful for getting prepared for Gaia DR2 (to be released by April 2018), as many people presented their ambitions for the future. As a general thought, it was great to see the enthusiasm Gaia is bringing to the community and the high level expectations many research groups have for future publications thanks to the new era in astrometry.

On our side, we presented a poster with the current state of our research. The poster was displayed during the whole congress and there was a special one hour long poster session in which I had the chance of explaining our work to the people interested. It was the first public presentation of the project to the community and I have to say I am very happy about the reception it had. The poster will be shown again in the Florence congress “Francesco’s Legacy – Star Formation in Space and Time” at the beginning of June and also will appear in the conference proceedings to be published about six months after the end of it.

The symposium itself was great, very well organised and with plenty of amenities, we even had the opportunity to go the the observatory of Nice, that opened in 1887 and at some point was the highest in the world (325m over the sea level). I had the chance to talk to many other researchers from my field and from other fields, explain my project and ideas and listen to theirs. Summarizing, I think it was a very productive congress, definitely was worth to go and it was a great experience that will have a very positive impact in the STARRY project. I am really looking forward to the next congress.

The last couple of months have been full of work that never ends… but it is supposed to be like this. Be a full-time PhD student demands most of my time.

The first few weeks were spent just doing the paperwork to formalize the registration as a PhD student and start to get an idea of how the University and my school works. This time represent an opportunity to get to know a group of important people in my school who offer me support for any problem or question I could have now and in the future.

The University of Leeds offers me a wide variety of activities, academic and recreational. Some part of the academic activities I have attended different workshops where I can develop my skills as I proceed through my research degree. These workshops, so far, have been very helpful and supply me with a lot of information to carry out my studies efficiently and to get in touch with other PhD students. The recreational activities, have allowed me to go out with my offices mates or with a big group from the university to explore Leeds and the neighbourhood.

At the same time, the university provides me with an excellent environment and facilities to carry on with my project. In the meanwhile, I have been learning about Herbig Ae/Be stars, clusters, and GAIA; which are the three key word of the project I will work on during my PhD.

After going through the process of applying for a PhD, passing the interview and waiting for the final answer, in March of 2016, I received an email from Dr. Rene Oudmaijer offering me the place to be part of the STARRY project. This was a wonderful surprise and the start of a change of life. I had to rush in finish my Masters degree in June 2016 and begin with all the documentation I needed to live in the UK.  Because nothing is perfect, the documentation process was very slow and with a lot of problems which delayed my arrival at Leeds from September 2016 to January 2017.  Finally, on 6th of January, I arrived in Leeds to start the first part of my PhD at the University of Leeds. My journey to Leeds was quite surprising. First of all, the airline lost one of my suitcases during the connecting flight; and secondly, the change in the weather. However, I had a very unexpected welcome; first, at the airport from my supervisor and second, on my first day in the University from the other PhD student and staff of the School of Physics and Astronomy.

In this short time, I am trying to develop the basic knowledge for my project and this project aim to estimate the nature of clusters around Herbig Ae/Be. This work will be elaborated with data from GAIA (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/home).

This PhD has been a big challenge, in a new country and in a different language… but it is just the beginning…