Junge AG Winterschool

Junge AG Winterschool, Heidelberg, 2022

In the city of Heidelberg, from 26. to 27. 11. 2022, the JAG (Junge Astronomische Gesellschaft) Winter School was held.
On the night before the start of the Winter School, the participants and the organizing team met over dinner, and exchanged the expectations for the upcoming event. Early next morning, a bus from downtown took participants to Koenigstuhl, to the beautiful House of Astronomy (Haus der Astronomie), where all the workshops and talks were held.

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Haus der Astronomie

The first activity was a TOPCAT/ADQL workshop, lead by Markus Demleitner, where participants had the opportunity to learn how to write good queries (small programs executed by the database), how to combine local data with server-side information, and much more.
After a lunch break, the sci-an team presented their online platform for - and talked about the future of - virtual meetings (see: https://www.sci-an.com/). It is no surprise that this talk was followed by a very interesting discussion, given the fact that almost all of us have been using some kind of virtual space for meetings since the pandemic started.
Following the talk from the sci-an team, the Caroline Herschel Award winner for the year 2022, Eva Grebel, gave a remote talk about job oportunities for aspiring astronomers. She gave a review of possible paths to take, and necessary conditions to fill, to reach a desired position. The talk was focused mainly on the conditions and opportunities in Germany.
Finishing the day in a more practical manner, Jochen Heidt, a professor at University of Heidelberg, gave the participants a tour of the telescopes of the Landessternwarte, located at the Koenigstuhl. In the end of the tour, he gave a talk about the history of building those telescopes, and some discoveries that have been made using them.
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Telescope Tour

In the end of a very productive day, the participants took the bus back to the Hauptbahnhof, and had dinner together, in the lovely 'Red die grüne Küche'.
The second, and last day of the Winterschool was reserved for the participants to present themselves, and to talk about their research. After the introductory slides, prepared by each participant, five talks followed:
  • Sofia Dimitrieva gave a remote talk, from Kyiv, titled "Astronomy and Architecture", within which she presented a plethora of different types of astronomical buildings, and the importance of combining beauty and functionality.
  • Katharina Jurk gave a talk about her bachelor thesis research; she talked about young stellar objects around supernova remnants in the LMC.
  • Marco Alban talked about mapping ionized gas outflows in AGN selected from the MaNGA survey.
  • Clara Escanuela Nieves gave a talk titled "(MST Flashcam): Signal reconstruction with the FlashCam".
  • Alex Golovin gave a talk titled "Meet your neighbours: the Fifth Catalogue of Nearby Stars (CNS5)".
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Talk session

Before leaving Koenigstuhl, all of the participants had an unconferenced discussion, lead by Markus Hundertmark, the main organizer of the Winter School.
At the end of the day, all of the participants had the oportunity to visit the Castle with funicular, and climb down to the Heidelberg Christmas Market.
We will use this oportunity to thank our main organizer Markus Hundertmark, and to all of the participants, with the hope that they went home enriched with new knowledge and experiences.
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Group photography

Photo credit: Steven Hämmerich

Text: Sabina Bahić



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