| Date: | 2010-02-04 09:03:00 | |
| Sender: | Jorge del Pino <Lasersat <lasersat@cenais.cu>> | |
| Subject: | [SLR-Mail] No. 1834: Goodbye... and hello! | |
| Author: | Jorge del Pino | |
| Content: | ******************************************************************************** SLR Electronic Mail 2010-02-04 09:03:00 UTC Message No. 1834 ******************************************************************************** Author: Jorge del Pino Subject: Goodbye... and hello! Subject: Goodbye... and hello! Dear colleagues: On June 7 1975, my first day of work as a rookie photographical observer at the Satellite Tracking station in Santiago de Cuba, I meet Karel Hamal and his team; they were searching for a suitable place to install one INTERKOSMOS 1st generation SLR. Finally they selected Santiago de Cuba as the place, and me to work with it. That June 7 was the first day of a memorable part of my life that is coming now to an end. In February 26th I will start my retirement after 35 years working in this field both in Cuba and Europe. I had the chance to work in photographical tracking, developing and operating SLR systems, to participate in a Doppler Campaign, and, in the last 10 years, on the installation, operation and local management of the IGS GPS station ?scub? in cooperation with the GFZ-Potsdam. In between I even had the chance to suggest the idea of the ILRS logo. I got the huge privilege to grow together with the SLR technique: to move from Telex to Twitter, from red to green, from nano to pico, Kbytes to Gbytes, from 5 inch floppy disk to flash memory, from sub Hertz to kHz. By fortune, maybe this is not the real end. If I am able to secure a Cuban travel visa, I plan to join later in the year the SLR team at the San Juan Station located at the ”Felix Aguilar Astronomical Observatory” (OAFA) Faculty of Natural, Physical and Exact Sciences, San Juan National University, Argentina in order to participate in the exciting upgrading plans to be carried out there in cooperation with the P. R. China. If this come true, all of you will receive one ”Alive!, It´s alive!” e-mail and probably we will meet at the next Workshop in Concepcion, Chile. This part of my life would had not been possible without the support of many people: The late Prof. Alla G. Massevitch and Dr. Suria K. Tatevian in Russia, Dr. Karel Hamal, my PhD supervisor who sadly passed away few years ago and his team and Academician Bohumil Kvasil in Prague; in Germany both Eastern and Unified, Prof. Dr. Horst Montag and Prof. Dr. Christoph Reigber, and many others in INTERKOSMOS, EUROLAS and ILRS. My thanks in particular my colleagues and close friends Drs. Reinhardt Neubert and Ludwig Grunwaldt. We worked together side by side over 30 years in the development and exploitation of the Cuban SLR 1953 station and with the Potsdam-2 and Potsdam-3 SLR Systems in Germany. Kudos to my old observer team in Cuba, we survived together mosquitoes, scorpions and hairy spiders, fought with bullfrogs who wanted to make the SLR telescope their home, endure cloudy nights, boredom and sleep deprivation, many thermos of coffee and long Tetris sessions while waiting for a Satellite. And, of course, without the support of my family and close friends who had me away from home hundreds of observing nights and many years abroad, I could had not achieved the little I did. And for my feelings towards the whole SLR community, the best is a quote from Shakespeare in Henry V (act IV scene III): ”We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” A Clear Sky and many Returns. Jorge del Pino Santiago de Cuba From: Lasersat ******************************************************************************** |