Back home again

Image Credit: John Deering / Creators Syndicate, Inc. / Hosted by gocomics.com Three weeks is a long time to be away from one's desk. Over that time, I've visited family in California and Illinois, helped facilitate a high school science teacher's continuing education workshop at McDonald Observatory in west Texas, and observed with the Keck Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. No wonder I slept most of the weekend away, as my body has no clue what time zone it is in. I think I'm somewhere in central Asia right now.
So, as you might expect, I have a mountain of email and regular mail and reading and phone messages to catch up on. It's always a bit of a rude awakening to come back to emails from people wondering why I've been ignoring them for three weeks, despite my having told them that I'm gone. I also need to catch up on astronomy news, as I don't know what (if anything) has happened in the past few weeks.
Some of my colleagues will also be coming home today from a major conference in Spain that I wanted to go to, but I wanted to go observing even more. So, I'll have to pick their brains and see what they learned. And, should any of it be exciting, I'll be sure to let you know!