Friday, Saturday and Sunday I was in Paris at the Rencontres du Ciel et de l'Espace 2004 (meetings of Sky and Space) organized by the Association Française de l'Astronomie, owner of the french astronomy magazine, Ciel et Espace.
It was at La Villette, Cité des Sciences (Sciences City).
There were astronomy stands, selling telescopes (the recent popular one is with the Coronado filter) , webcams, magazines, books, meteorites, etc..
It's the largest amateur astronomers gathering in Europe.
It's also an opportunity to meet old friends, make new ones, have supper with our friends, good laughs.
And there are conferences upon conferences, 3 or 4 at the same time and it's hard to have to choose.
I aksed Roger-Maurice Bonnet who used to be the leader of the ESA science team (and responsible for Huygens) what he felt about the recent radar images of Titan. He said with his eyes beaming they reminded him of Percival Lowell's drawings of Mars!
Jean-François Clervoy, the french astronaut present at the event, said he believed the US would not accept a very long gap without US manned capapbility into space (between the end of the Shuttle and manned CEV flights).
Xavier Pasco talked about the Vision importance in the US and how it's very unlikely the US could abandon a manned spac program because it's written in their manifest destiny.
André Brahic talked about the latest Cassini pictures (and movies) and showed us amazing things about the rings (like arcs inside a division).
Brahic is very passionate, extremely talkative and funny, very knowledgeable and as much as possible available and extremely popular; when he starts a conference, we know when it begins but not when it will end and we warned our friend who organized a supper in a restaurant, right after, that we first wanted to be at the auditorium for his conference, he knew what it meant:-)
Here are my pictures of these rencontres.

Raoul