This week the Sloan Foundation 2.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory will reopen and start observing for the new season. Did you know that all SDSS Collaboration members can sign up for nightly notifications of what the telescope has been observing?

The tweeter for this exciting week in the annual life of SDSS will be Isabelle Paris from the Osservatorio astronomico di Trieste (Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, Italy). Isabelle has been an SDSS member since she started working on her PhD with Patrick Petitjean at the IAP (Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, France). The topic of her thesis was the cosmological evolution of the opacity of the intergalactic medium, which Isabelle studied using SDSS-DR7 and BOSS data. Following this Isabelle has a 2 year postdoc at the Universidad de Chile, and is now an External Participant of the SDSS Collaboration based in Trieste.

Isabelle Paris pictured here hard at work as a collaboration meeting in Pittsburgh in July 2010.

Isabelle is the Chair of the (SDSS-III) quasar science working-group and is also in charge of generating the quasar catalogues for SDSS. So I think we can expect to hear a lot about supermassive black holes and very high redshift sources this week.

Above,  Isabelle is pictured in July 2010 attending a BOSS Lyman-alpha Forest and Quasar Working Groups meeting in Pittsburgh.