We have only strongly disagreed on one issue I know of; The issue of Intelligent Design being given equal time in our schools.

We seem to agree on the importance of exploring the wonders of the universe- that's what really matters on this board.

(As for my name being on the paper- don't read too much into that... I was unaware that we had even imaged Xena until a few days after the fact. Here is the story behind that: The discovery was made during one of our engineering nights...

For well over a year after the Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics (LGSAO) system was online, ALL of our laser nights were 'Engineering Nights'. These nights were devoted to improving and testing the system. We did science on these nights, and several papers resulted- but the main goal was quantifying and improving the performance of the system, the science we did was mainly to demonstrate the system's abilities.

We are now offering the LGSAO system to astronomers for science observations, currently our laser runs happen 1-2 times a month and are ~5 nights in a row, the first night is often an Engineering Night, where we tweak the system and work out any bugs that have cropped up since the last run.

Sometimes we get urgent requests from astronomers to make special observations on our engineering nights- if we agree to make these observations on an engineering night then whatever papers that result from those observations are required to list the laser guide star team members as co-authors.

This means that I have my name on a few astronomy papers that I dont even know about, it does NOT mean that I did the years of hard work in astronomy that went into those discoveries. Everyone on the LGSAO team has put in years of hard work on the system to make it available for science.)