VICS

So that was the VICS field - a fairly deep image of an empty piece of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, taken with Hubble's ACS camera.

We had 3 posters at the current AAS meeting on preliminary VICS results. Including this dwarf galaxy

Short version: we have thousands of intracluster stars, giving a decent estimate of the total unbound numbers of stars in the cluster (modulo it being a single small field, but there is other data from AGB and PNe surveys), some other interesting objects I might discuss later, and that picture - a beautiful little blue dwarf spheroidal):
"A team of astronomers has discovered a new dwarf galaxy and up to four possible star clusters in a region of the Virgo clusters of galaxies previously thought to be empty..." etc and so forth


Or to quote the official press release (which was totally ignored in favour of other results involving HST, Spitzer etc, including an amusing Sloan discovery of a dwarf galaxy in the Virgo constellation interacting with the Milky Way

Amusingly enough, I did not get to see any of the 5 posters I co-authored that went up on tuesday...

I did get to, literally, see some of the posters I co-authored today, I think there were 3 official posters and one extra Kelly stuck on the wall. Made up for the one that was hidden behind the OUP booth by the appalingly bad layout of the poster sessions...