SSAA e-news No 55

The SSAA committee wishes you all joyful holidays and a happy New Year,
Marc Audard, Brice-Olivier Demory, Oliver Müller, and Margit Haberreiter

1. Update from the SSAA

The GA of 2023 was successfully held 5-6 October 2023 at the Geneva Observatory in Versoix.

Many thanks for the Geneva Observatory for hosting the GA.

Thanks also to everybody who attended the GA for their participation and the presenters for their great talks during the science session.

Some key outcome of the GA:

• Margit Haberreiter has been confirmed as president for the next 3 years.
• Michael Moser is the new webmaster of SSAA.

The minutes, slides, short reports of the GA can be found following this link:
https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/kPbZbwGUde7xnQO

2. 54th Saas-Fee Course for 2025 selected

Title (TBC): The early universe in the JWST era
Scientific Organizers: Pascal Oesch and colleagues (TBD)
Congratulations to Pascal and the team!

3. Submission deadlines for recurrent SSAA Awards

• Deadline for MERAC Awards: March 31 and September 30, 2024
• Deadline for Travel Awards: March 31, 2024
• Deadline for Outreach Awards: March 31, 2024
• Deadline for Edith Alice Müller Award 2024: June 15, 2024

4. The committee has reviewed the MERAC proposals of Call 2 in 2023.

We warmly congratulate Caroline Haslebacher, Rui Marques-Chaves, Erik Meier Valdés, Sabina Raducan, Oliver Schib, and Mengyuan Xiao for receiving the MERAC Awards.

Further details on the MERAC awards can be found under: https://saa.phys.ethz.ch/funding/merac/

5. Picture Competition by SNSF (Deadline 31 January 2024)

The Swiss National Science Foundation is inviting Swiss researchers to send their best photographs, images and short videos to the SNSF Scientific Image Competition.

For further details see the link below: https://www.snf.ch/en/xcDCNJikRZXwYWC5/page/science-communication/image-competition

6. Reminder to pay the membership fee

The 30 CHF annual SSAA membership payment can be made online: https://ssaa.ch/the-society/membership-join/membership-registration/payment

You can also set an automatic annual payment by clicking on the “Subscribe” button (but in that case you need to have a PayPal account).

7. General information on the Society

For more information concerning the SGAA/SSAA, astronomy in Switzerland, and related topics visit our Website https://ssaa.ch.

For any information and messages to be circulated via the SGAA/SSAA mailing list please e-mail your text to the secretary: secretary@ssaa.ch.

Thank you!