European Astronomical Society
e-Newsletter  13
June 2021

Our annual meeting is approaching fast, 28 June to 2 July, but before that, on 11 June, the Society is hosting a presentation and discussion of the latest ASTRONET Roadmap (see later). These exercises, coordinated by funding agencies across Europe, have proved to be influential in the past and there is every reason to believe that this report will set the agenda for future large scale research investments in astronomy. I'd encourage everyone to attend and to participate actively. You can register here.

The Annual Meeting is once more a record breaker - over 2000 people have registered. We are again very much in the debt of the Leiden team who have put this together for a second year, ably abetted by the wider community in the Netherlands and supported by our Kuoni partners. I am very grateful to all those who have worked so hard to make this meeting possible and to give us the opportunity to share new results and interact with colleagues. We will, as usual, celebrate our prize winners and I look forward especially to the first Fritz Zwicky Prize lecture (by Martin Rees) and to hearing from our first Jocelyn Bell Burnell Inspiration Medal winner (Mirjana Pović).

Your Society is constantly thinking of ways to improve astronomy in Europe. Recently we heard that our application to the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation to support workshops for young astronomers has been successful. After the initial event we hope to secure funds for a series of workshops in the coming years. More details can be found below.

We continue to be joined by new Organisational Members who help to keep the Society financially healthy through their annual contributions. The latest is the Czech Astronomical Society that you can read about in this Newsletter. The EAS Annual Meeting was held in Prague (for the third time) in 2017 and we are delighted to welcome them.

I very much look forward to seeing you at the Annual Meeting and wish you a safe and successful summer.

Roger Davies
EAS President

The EAS has received four letters of intent to host the EAS Annual Meetings 2023 and 2024. The EAS has contacted the potential hosting teams. The final decision on the host of the EAS Annual Meeting 2023 will be taken by the EAS Council in October 2022.

We invite all EAS members to register for the EAS 2021 Annual Meeting and to participate in the following sessions dedicated to development, sustainability, inclusion and welfare:

• SS2 : Astronomy for Development
• SS6 : Diversity and Inclusion Day
• SS8 : Welfare and Mental Health in Astronomy Research
• SS9 : European Forum of Astronomical Communities
• SS30 : Astronomy for Planet Earth: forging a sustainable future
• SS34 : Early Career Astronomers & their supporters
• LS3 : Healthy Careers in Astronomy

For further information please look at the EAS 2021 programme.

In 2022 the EAS will organize a first pilot workshop. If successful, we will start the series with a call for two further workshops, covering the period 2023-2025. The aim will, as far as possible, be to host workshops in centres across the regions of Europe.

The Society is very grateful to the Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation which is a private institution that supports scientific research and education with an emphasis on physics. The Foundation encourages scientific exchange by organizing conferences and seminars, supporting talented students and contributing in various ways to improving science education in schools. The Wilhelm and Else Heraeus Foundation is highly regarded among physicists, and is considered to be Germany's most important private donor institution in the field of physics.

Shortly after the foundation of the ČAS, a handful of enthusiasts decided to build a public observatory in Prague. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the fulfilment of this dream was facilitated by the fact that one of the founders of the new state, Slovak politician and diplomat, and general of the French army, Dr. Milan Rastislav Štefánik, was an astronomer by his original profession, for several years working at the Meudon Observatory. The Štefánik Observatory on the Petřín hill in Prague was officially opened in 1928 and became the site of the ČAS. The observatory, among its public activities, always played an important role in the training of young generation of astronomers, and the same was true also at several other public observatories founded in Czechoslovakia after the WW II. Many current Czech professional astronomers, members of ČAS, grew-up at those observatories. Since 1920, the Society published its own journal Říše hvězd (Realm of Stars), bringing news on astronomy not only in the country but from all around the world. Branches of the ČAS were established in larger towns and big cities all over Czechoslovakia.

The Society supported observations of the Sun, meteors or variable stars through specialized sections where both professional as well as amateur astronomers worked. Traditional sections were later expanded to cover new topics, such as space research and astronautics, extrasolar planets, cosmology, etc., but also the issues of light pollution which bothers astronomers as well as the society as whole. Members of the Society are very active in astronomical outreach: they present lectures at observatories, schools or public facilities, they contribute to newspapers, magazines, books and are often invited to TV or radio broadcasting. ČAS is also organizing the Astronomical Olympiad with participation of thousands of young people each year. The Society decorates distinguished persons by various medals and prizes, the most prestigious of them being the Nušl Prize, named after Prof. František Nušl who was one of the Society's founders and its long-term President. Prof. Nušl also represented Czechoslovakia at the first IAU Assembly in Rome in 1922 where our country became an IAU member state.

The activities and overall visibility of the ČAS were greatly enhanced after 1989 when it revived its international contacts and also became an Affiliated Society of the EAS. ČAS recently became an Organisational Member of the EAS. The Society co-organized the EWASS conference in Prague in 2017 when the Society celebrated its 100th anniversary. Today ČAS is closely linked to Czech professional institutions, namely the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (the official site of the ČAS is at the Ondřejov Observatory near Prague) and to Czech universities teaching astronomy and astrophysics. On the other hand, many ČAS members work at public observatories or are closely cooperating with them. Professional astronomy in the Czech Republic is governed by the Czech National Committee for Astronomy, the section of ČAS that coordinates its activities towards the IAU or EAS.

The Society also largely profits from the fact that our country became a member state of ESO (since 2007) and of ESA (since 2008). The Czech Republic is thus involved in large European projects such as ESO's observatories (VLT, ALMA, E-ELT), the European Solar Telescope (EST) to be built on Canary Islands, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), and key ESA's current and forthcoming space missions like Solar Orbiter, JUICE, Athena, and LISA.

Prof. Petr Heinzel
President of the ČAS
http://www.astro.cz
http://www.asu.cas.cz

ASTRONET is a consortium of European research funding bodies and national representatives purposed with developing a new science vision and roadmap, taking forward the pioneering and influential reports last updated around 2015. It includes as associates and observers ESA, ESO and the SKA and has close links to APPEC and the EAS.

The webinar is hosted by the EAS and will take place on 11 June, from 8h00 to 13h30 UTC (i.e. 9h00-14h30 UK, 10h00-15h30 CEST).

Registration is open now and you can complete this at this link. We have created a Slack space for the ASTRONET Roadmap webinar. The invitation to join the space is here.

We look forward to hearing your views. Any written comments on the drafts are still welcomed direct to Malcolm Booy (malcolm.booy @ stfc.ukri.org).

OPTICON and RadioNet have not only transformed the way European astronomers work together but also enabled key discoveries in recent years including imaging the environment of the black hole in M87 and the multi-wavelength follow-up of the neutron star merger GW170817. Building on that success, the European Commission (EC) invited OPTICON and RadioNet to join forces and bid for a new type of contract, alongside similar initiatives in atmospheric science and nano-technology, as "Pilot" programmes for Horizon Europe to show how EC support can open up access and realise these collaborative gains on an even larger thematic scale.

The RadioNet and OPTICON teams rose to this challenge and successfully proposed a combined OPTICON-RadioNet Pilot project (ORP) to be coordinated by CNRS under the leadership of Jean-Gabriel Cuby of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM). This 4 year, 15 million euro, contract will continue the highly successful optical and radio astronomy trans-national access programmes of recent years and at the same time develop a new strategic framework to take European astronomy forward into the era of mega-facilities like ELT, SKA, CTA and the evolving field of multi-messenger astronomy including gravitational waves and astroparticle physics. This will be done by a series of joint activities which bring together astronomers from a wide range of disciplines and experience.

The ORP will develop a strategic vision to enable European astronomers to make the best use of current and new facilities over the next decades. It will engage the community across a wide range of stakeholders including funding agencies, international organisations, infrastructures and users. It will consider a range of options to access infrastructures at all scales and how the EC can help to widen this access further still. At the practical level, the ORP will develop new tools to enable astronomers throughout our community to use the telescopes which they need to accomplish their science goals, including new proposal tools, improved support systems and data processing frameworks designed to allow scientists to use and coordinate observations from multiple facilities across the electromagnetic spectrum. Cross-domain training schools will help to train the next generation of multi-wavelength astronomers. Finally, the ORP will investigate and improve instrument performance, including adaptive optics research, and ensure effective dissemination of these results to the entire community via workshops and schools. Further details of these activities will feature in future EAS newsletters.

Underpinning all of this will be an enhanced trans-national access programme to both physical infrastructures, distributed networks and archival data. This will initially build upon the existing RadioNet and OPTICON processes which will draw gradually closer and more aligned as the contract proceeds. Access to a range of optical telescopes will be via a common time allocation process already familiar to many users. For the ORP, the optical network comprises 14 distinct telescopes in a size range from 0.6 to 10 metres. These offer a mixture of traditional classically scheduled Principal Investigator led projects, some queue scheduled observing where this is a normal operational mode of the telescope in question and a number of robotic telescopes well suited to both monitoring and quick reaction alert type observations. The optical programme has two calls for proposals each year, usually open through February and August. These calls will be highlighted on the ORP website.

Access to Europe's largest and most powerful radio telescopes and arrays, from sub-mm to metre wavelengths will be offered via a converging proposal process, with the ultimate aim that the same mechanism can be used to apply to all ORP facilities. These facilities include large single dishes (Effelsberg, SRT , 30m Pico Veleta and APEX) and powerful arrays at all wavelengths: the European VLBI Network, LOFAR, e-MERLIN, and NOEMA. Archive access will be enabled for the WSRT survey system Apertif, (ALTA) and the LOFAR Long Term Archive (LTA) through the virtual access process. The European ALMA users will be supported at all stages from conception of a scientific objective to publication of the results through transnational access to the European ARC network (ARC), including the visits at ARCs.

Time domain astronomy will benefit from virtual access to a large and growing suite of small and medium sized optical, infrared and potentially radio facilities combined with new tools to identify, prioritise and co-ordinate observations of transients and sources meriting long time monitoring. A key tool for this will be a Target Observation Manager which is an interface for viewing and sharing photometric and spectroscopic data of time-domain targets. A dedicated activity will offer transnational access to the CANARY adaptive optics testbed at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope providing both telescope time and technical support to AO experiments needing on-sky testing to show proof of concepts for new ideas. Optical interferometry will be supported by both new tools for access to and data reduction for instruments such as the GRAVITY and Hi-5/Viking instruments at the VLTI. This will be complimented by training schools and a network of VLTI expertise centres modelled on the ALMA regional nodes.

ORP will also address the increasing threat to both optical and radio astronomy from new mega-constellations of low-orbit satellites designed to provide ubiquitous internet coverage. The work will include quantification and mitigation of the impact as well as policy issues in both the optical and radio domains.

You can learn more about the ORP by visiting its website or attending the session to take place at the virtual EAS Annual Meeting in June.

This project is funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004719.

The ORP Team