As you may know, or may not know, the coming year 2009 has been declared the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) by the UNESCO, on proposal by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Check out www.astronomy2009.org for more information. Now you certainly know about it.

In any case, the IYA2009 organisers asked professional astronomers to engage in the activities of the IYA2009, one of the many possibilities of doing so is starting a blog. So, that's how I came to start the blog, because I am a professional astronomer.

I work as a research assistant at the Instituut voor Sterrenkunde (institute for astronomy) at the Katolieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). One other thing I am doing for the IYA2009 is organising a series of public lectures on astronomy related topics here in Leuven. I will not give a talk myself, because I am actually from Austria and my Dutch is not (yet) good enough to give a public talk on a science topic in that language. I wonder if my Dutch will ever be good enough to give a talk... Anyway, we will have about eight talks here in Leuven by some big shots, I will report on it in a later post.

Today I just want to explain how I came to name the blog "Stefan Sternthaler". "Die Sterntaler" is a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm (read the English or German Wikipedia entry of it). It deals with a very poor girl that gives away all her belongings to even poorer people. Because she is so very kind-hearted, she is finally awarded lots of gold coins (Taler) that fall down from the starry skies. Since I am an aficionado of astronomy, a former school mate once named me "Stefan Sternthaler" (danke Isi!), because it is close to my real name. I liked it very much, so I chose it as the name of my blog.
If a native English speaker happens to read this blog, could you please tell me how ridiculous this name sounds to you? Just let me know. I think it is a nice name anyway.

Read you soon!