Tonight was the official opening of the new building the cosmologists inhabit. Having initially been overlooked I'd managed to wangle a ticket to the opening and the lecture.

Quite an event it was too with some very very notable people in attendance. The top astronomer in the country giving the lecture, famous TV astronomers, my office colleague's observatory Head and many many others.

What was particularly brilliant about the lecture looking at the next couple of decades in astronomy and cosmology was how it managed to appeal to the school kids in the front row and the senior researchers further back. The professional astronomers in attendance and the interested laypeople such as myself. Very clever. And some mindblowing stuff about alternate universes or dark energy and so on that sound like they're straight from science fiction.