Join us Tuesday June 10th for our the next Full Moon-th Meetup, our guest will be Dr. Almudena Alonso Herrero, a senior staff scientist at the National Research Council in Spain and member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. She is an expert in star forming and active galaxies – and she’s one of the professors at the Vatican Observatory Summer School!
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Our tradition of hosting online meetups with our Sacred Space Astronomy members and the Vatican Observatory staff, scholars and friends during the Full Moon in Tucson (or thereabout) continues on June 10, 2025 at 12:00 Noon ET (9:00 AM Tucson time – with daylight savings time).
This meetup is a perk for our Sacred Space Astronomy subscribers- you get to chat with each other, and astronomers and scientists from the Vatican Observatory!
We’ll also have the latest astronomy news and an update about the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope1.
Since 2003, Almudena Alonso Herrero has been Spanish co-investigator in the JWST-MIRI European Consortium and currently coordinates the activities of the nearby galaxy team. She belonged to the science teams of the NICMOS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, MIPS on the Spitzer Space Telescope, and CanariCam on the Gran Telescopio Canarias.
She is one of the founders of the international GATOS collaboration, which has the overarching goal of understanding how the growth of supermassive black holes is coupled to the innermost parts of their host galaxies.
Almudena Alonso Herrero is an alumna of the 1993 VOSS – whose theme was The Nuclei of Galaxies.
When? Tuesday, June 10th: Rain or shine
What time? These meetups will happen around lunch time in North America: in particular, 9:00 am Tucson time, which is 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.
How do you access these meetups? Join Sacred Space Astronomy and you’ll get an email with the full link! If you are already a member, you can also log into this website, and the link will be visible below.
*The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope consists of the Alice P. Lennon Telescope, and the Thomas J. Bannan Astrophysics Facility.
About the cover image
Caption: Tendrils of dark dust can be seen threading across the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 7172 in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy lies approximately 110 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. The lane of dust threading its way across NGC 7172 — which is viewed side-on in this image — is obscuring the luminous heart of the galaxy, making NGC 7172 appear to be nothing more than a normal edge-on spiral galaxy. When astronomers inspected NGC 7172 across the electromagnetic spectrum they quickly discovered that there was more to it than meets the eye: NGC 7172 is a Seyfert galaxy — a type of galaxy with an intensely luminous active galactic nucleus powered by matter accreting onto a supermassive black hole. This image combines data from two sets of Hubble observations, both of which were proposed to study nearby active galactic nuclei. The image also combines data from two instruments — Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFCS).
This galaxy was the topic of a research paper Dr. Almudena Alonso Herrero co-authored: A biconical ionised gas outflow and evidence of positive feedback in NGC 7172 uncovered by MIRI/JWST
