On the 25th of September, I went to the "Researchers' night" organized at the National Technical University of Athens at the center of Athens, Greece. It was an outreach activity addressed to pupils and young students who were curious to learn about innovative technological developments and get a feeling of the findings of scientists in several disciplines of engineering.
Surprisingly, the historic NTUA building was full of people who chose to spend that Friday night together with us. It was like a big feast for science. Personally, I was located at a special "European" corner together with other Marie Curie fellows. During the whole evening, children and even their parents approached me to express their questions regarding my poster on cloud-topped PBL studies. Everybody was aware of the rising problem of climate change and they gave me the opportunity to highlight the significance of tackling and mitigating their uncertainties. By getting additional motivation from the ITaRS videos which were running on a screen in front of me, people wanted to know what is ITaRS and what this network has been working on the last few years.
In addition, together with my colleagues, we were performing real time experiments to demonstrate the application of lasers in studying the atmosphere. Our set-up of a small LRSU lidar attracted such attention from the crowd that, at around midnight, we realized we were the last ones at the room running experiments. It was a long beautiful night very different from the others of the year!
