{"id":1199,"date":"2008-12-17T00:52:24","date_gmt":"2008-12-17T00:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/?p=1199"},"modified":"2014-08-07T13:04:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T13:04:00","slug":"the-christmas-star-apollo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/2008\/12\/17\/the-christmas-star-apollo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Star & Apollo"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s become sort of a tradition that each year I give the Christmas lecture for Astro2 (The Astronomy & Physics Society of NUI Maynooth). Each year I give a talk on the Christmas Star and each year I change it up a bit and focus more on different aspects. I really changed the talk up quite a bit this year and got quite a bit deeper in the biblical end of things than I had before. I enjoyed giving the talk this evening, and the audience seemed to enjoy it too which is always nice!<\/p>\n

It occurs to me that I’ve never published my slides from the talk before so I’ve uploaded them as a PDD today (minus the video demos). You can download the slides here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, for me the best part of the night was a surprise presentation from the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies (IFAS). I had absolutely no idea there was anything special going to happen after my talk. I was delighted to see the chair person of IFAS at the talk, but I had no idea he had an ulterior motive, let alone that that motive was to present me with an absolutely wonderful gift as a thank-you for my work on www.irishastronomy.org<\/a> over the years. As anyone who was there can testify to, I was literally lost for words … ME … lost for words! They gave me a framed collection of pins of all the mission patches for all the Apollo missions. It’s absolutely fabulous and it will take pride-of-place on my desk. I just can’t thank the guys in IFAS enough. It’s unbelievably wonderful.<\/p>\n

Below is a quick snap of the IFAS chair Michael O’Connell presenting the patches snapped with my iPhone by a helpful Astro2 member, and below that is a picture of the framed patches (not taken with the iPhone!).<\/p>\n

\"Michael<\/p>\n

\"Apollo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s become sort of a tradition that each year I give the Christmas lecture for Astro2 (The Astronomy & Physics Society of NUI Maynooth). Each year I give a talk on the Christmas Star and each year I change it up a bit and focus more on different aspects. I really changed the talk up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[506,36,37,474,82,491],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-astronomy","tag-astro-2","tag-astronomy","tag-ifas","tag-news","tag-nui-maynooth","tag-presentation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-jl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1199"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8002,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1199\/revisions\/8002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1199"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=1199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}