A New Friend

This might look like an ordinary snapshot, but to me it is part of an extraordinary story. I was checking in to the B&B in Vermont when this gentleman arrived to register as well.  The short version is that he was one of the speakers at the gathering the next day.  So we agreed to meet for breakfast the next morning because we were both going to the gathering at the same time.  His name is Nimesh, and he is an astrophysicist and a project engineer at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard and Smithsonian and a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration.  So he is at the cutting edge of radio astronomy and I am an amateur astronomer, who doesn't know very much about radio astronomy.  Over breakfast he was very patient in explaining how the Event Horizon Telescope worked in terms I could understand.  While he was explaining all this, it occurred to me that this is an absolutely amazing thing that I get to have breakfast with such a brilliant scientist.  Where else could that happen, but at the Stellafane Convention!  We got to spend more time talking at the convention when we had lunch together and talked about our personal histories.  What an amazing thing!  This photograph, below, is what the first photograph of a black hole looks like, when it was released to the public back in April.