Since things went a little different than planned, this blog appears later than planned as well. As the whole world already seemed to know quickly, our embargo was broken. Accidentally, but still. This meant we were suddenly very busy before we thought we would be. But it didn’t stop this Monday from turning into a great day too.
Even though the first message that morning was from Edd asking if I’d seen the picture online already – assuming it shouldn’t have been there yet indeed. I forwarded it to the team and the first reply from one of them had just one word in it. I’ll leave it to your imagination which word that was, but it said enough. We skipped the planned breakfast and eventually decided to ignore the broken embargo. Since this is a rather big convention, we often went our own ways, but knew where to find each other through personal messages on twitter (you’ve got to love twitter).
Then I ran into Kevin (and later Jordan too – this place is full of Zookeepers) and Chris and I attended his talk about the outcome of his latest ‘Voorwerp quest’. Kevin pointed me out in the audience and Chris and I pointed thumbs up to Kevin afterwards. In between, we had visited Bill at our poster-stand and I hung out at the ASTRON-booth. It was great to see all the visitors looking generally amazed by the explanation of the LOFAR-telescope. (That, and the ASTRON-crew is a fun bunch to hang out with).
When it was 12.45 in our time zone, it was time for our press release. I had already talked to Henk-Sjoerd – a very nice reporter from De Wereldomroep – right before that, but he also had his mic ready to interview me afterwards. We finally revealed the Hubble picture of Hanny’s Voorwerp next door from press room 310. And at the same time we saw it on all the official websites of NASA and Hubble, while Chris was live blogging and Rob was live tweeting the event.
Right after, I did some more interviews, posed for pictures, shook hands and handed out autographs. A bit surreal. My e-mailbox stretched to new limits that afternoon and I’ve still not seen everything that appeared, but thank you everyone who has let me know they saw my story somewhere! It’s also fun to see people are pleasantly surprised when I e-mail them back. Like all the food and drinks here, everyone is very sweet.
That evening was the evening of the tweet-up, initiated by the lovely Zookeeper Rob. For those not in the know-how: a tweet-up is an actual meet-up of a group of people who find each other on twitter (in this case, the group of AAS-people). We had agreed on 7pm at ‘our’ hotel, with that name starting with an S… We quickly moved on to a pub though, where we watched and cheered for both teams of the football game, where we experienced the best ‘high fives’ and where Michiel and I taught the English guys some Dutch (‘Maak dat de kat wijs’). I also got pretty good at playing Mornington Crescent after Chris reminded us of the three-word-rule and I quickly came up with one of my favourite places: Tottenham Court Road.
I had also recruited people who-are-not-on-twitter-because-they-don’t-want-to-share-it-with-the-world-they-eat-great-eggs-in-the-morning to come along anyway and Jason did eventually manage to find our party, where he quickly found himself in a funny discussion with Chris and me about journalism. You had to be there. I hope you’re liking these behind-the-scenes stories though, but this is it for this evening…
The Hanny’s Voorwerp Team, with from left to right: Kevin, Bill, me and Chris, in front of our poster. Picture: Rob Simpson.
George, me and Michiel at the ASTRON-booth.
Later I managed to get in a picture with the whole ASTRON-crew. From left to right: Joeri van Leeuwen, Michael Wise, Hanny van Arkel, George Heald and Michiel Brentjens.
Beautiful Seattle from the Washington State Convention Centre. Picture: Hanny van Arkel.
2 Comments
May I ask where the embargo breach happened? At least hardly anyone seems to have noticed it as no links to that place were being tweeted around in the ‘usual circles’ prior to 20:45 UTC. I for one had made sure to hit “return” in the correct second when posting my story …
And I appreciate that very much, so thank you Daniel. I do know who and why, but since it was an accident and they apologised, I don’t want to go into it anymore. And indeed, even though it was mentioned by two Dutch press tweeple, we managed to keep it quieter than one would expect.