I travelled to Banyuls-sur-Mer in southern France, attending the International Summer School on The Interstellar Medium of Nearby Galaxies (GISM3). The lectures spanned the areas of methods (machine learning, information measures, Bayesian inference, simulations), observations (across the electromagnetic spectrum, including various emission lines), and theory (interstellar grains, astrochemistry, stellar populations, nucleosynthesis).
I participated in a hands-on project on Numerical Simulations Using the RAMSES and AREPO Codes. You can find the slides of our presentation at the bottom of this page.
In this project, we also had lots of fun setting up various hydrodynamical instabilities in a simulation setting. Below, you can see a GIF of a Rayleigh–Taylor instability – an instability occuring on the surface of a two fluids under the effect of gravity where the denser fluid is placed on top of the lighter one. Even the smallest imperfection at the boundary layer will cause the dense fluid to fall down.
Close to the ocean, light pollution is less of an issue, so the night sky looks fantastic – one could see the Milky Way band with the naked eye! Using the long-exposure setting and slightly increasing the contrast of the resulting picture, one can create a marvellous photograph like the one below:
