Newsflash:

We finally received the confirmation that we will get more funding from the Chilean astronomical funding agencies. This will allow us to help students and postdocs, who handed in an application for travel help and are from outside of Chile, to cover part of their airfare. The exact amount will be announced shortly to the persons in question. It will be in the order of 500 USD or more (max. your full flight costs). So please do not hesitate any longer and book your flights to Chile before they become expensive!

Please: If you have applied for a travel grant and do no longer want to take part in the meeting, let us know as soon as possible. Others, e.g. young students with no funding from their home institute, may rely on that.

3rd Announcement

1) Programme

The preliminary programme is now available on our website

http://www.astro-udec.cl/modest15/Program.html

Here you will find the decisions made by the SOC in order if you have a talk or if you have to present a poster instead. We had 75 applications for a talk but only 50 slots available. If you are one of the unlucky ones, we are extremely sorry and hope that you still consider to join the MODEST 15 conference. Otherwise, please let us know if you will cancel your registration.

We have reserved enough time for a poster presentation, so if you have a poster, please bring one slide to present your poster in one minute (sharp) on the Monday. This event is followed by a poster viewing with the optional possibility to test some Chilean wine (has to be paid extra) from small wineries.

For the participants with a talk: You have a very long talk of 20 minutes, so please time your talk that you do not need more. We will advise the session chairs to be very strict with the schedule. After each talk we will have the possibility to discuss for 10 minutes.

2) "Conference Fee"

We are still awaiting more funding to sponsor all social events for all participants. We are at the moment acquiring funds to waive the fee for all students and postdocs, independently if they have asked for it and/or have registered late. For all senior participants, we might have to charge you a small fee of 35,000 CLP (which is about 55-60 USD). But, please be patient with us. Chilean funding agencies are always late...

3) Travel Grants

First: Please check our website for updates!!!

In this first round of funding we will only consider those students and postdocs, who are presenting (talk or poster) AND have requested a travel grant BEFORE the deadline of November, 30th.

The travel grant will be 165,000 CLP (about 270 USD) + 35,000 CLP conference fee waived. This is enough to cover local costs like food, a cheap accommodation (e.g. Hotel San Martin or Hostal B&B) and the bus within Chile to reach Concepcion.

For international students and postdocs, please be patient! We will definitely get more funding and will have some money towards your airfares but we still cannot guarantee anything.

For those who applied late - if more funding comes in we will reconsider your request.

If you are entitled for a travel grant and need to cancel your participation, please let us know asap, as we will then distribute your money to the other participants.

4) Welcome Cocktail

Sunday, March 1st ca. 18.00 - 21.00 h

The welcome cocktail with the registration desk will take place in the Hotel Araucano, as the university is closed on Sundays. It is the hotel in which most of you are staying anyway and is located in the city centre of Concepcion (near Plaza de la Independencia - the central square).

5) Conference Excursion

Wednesday, March 4th ca. 14.30 - 20.30 h

The excursion will take you to Lota, a small town, known for its coal mines in the past. Today all mines are defunct but we are able to descend into one of the mines which extends underneath the ocean in a guided tour with original miners. We will provide translators. The other part of the tour will bring us to the Parque Lota and Museum. This parque was designed for one of the rich mining families and is very beautiful to visit. The former house of the family is now a small museum. Lota was one of the first cities (worldwide) which had a telephone net and electric lighting.

6) Conference Dinner

Thursday, March 5th ca. 20.00 - 24.00 h

The conference dinner will take place in Hacienda Patagonia, a nice restaurant with South-Chilean style (Patagonia) food. We have provided three options for you to choose from:
a) Lamb-chops (cordero) - grilled lamb is their specialty
b) Beef filet (filete)
c) Vegetarian Pasta - for our vegetarian friends and colleagues
We need your choice of dinner at latest on the Monday early morning registration. Please let us also know if you want to bring an additional person to the dinner.

Please check the website for regular updates on everything important!!!

See you all soon in Concepcion

The MODEST 15 team

Newsflash for students and postdocs:

Thanks to financial support we received so far, we can waive the social fee for all students and postdocs and are able to offer for those who applied for a travel grant at least 280 USD per person.

We keep you updated as we soon expect further funding and so we will be able to waive the social fee for everybody and have more and higher travel grants available.

MODEST 15 - 2nd Announcement

The Theory Group at the Departamento de Astronomia at the Universidad de Concepcion would like to invite you to MODEST 15, in Concepcion, Chile at the

2nd - 6th of March 2015.

Registration is still open - please visit our website or use the registration form at the end of this e-mail. The deadline for registrations applying for travel grants is

November, 30th 2014.

We would like to have the registrations from all participants also by this time, as we will start to finalise our programme after that (i.e. assigning talks). But we will consider late registrations until the maximum capacity of the conference room (approx. 100) is reached.

Our schedule allows for about 50 talks. We do not differentiate between review, invited or contributed talk. Every speaker will get a 20 minute talk (strict) plus a 10 minute discussion period. This gives ample time for fruitful discussions after each talk, instead of hosting a discussion session at the end of each day. We would like to hand out the confirmations for talks soon after the soft deadline above, to give participants sufficient time to book their flights to Chile as cheap as possible.

The conference website is hosted locally (in contrast to the main institute site = without dash), so please use the full address above (including the dash and the modest15) to connect directly with us. For reasons unknown to us we disappeared from Google.

Scientific topics:

- young embedded clusters and star forming regions
- globular and open clusters near and far
- UCDs and galactic nuclei
- numerical modelling of dense stellar systems

We have decided against special invited speakers but amongst the registered persons so far we have:
- Sambaran Banerjee - Matthew Benacquista - Roberto Capuzzo-Dolcetta - Richard de Grijs - Douglas Heggie - Thijs Kouvenhoven - Pavel Kroupa - Andreas Kuepper - Richard Lane - Nathan Leigh - Juan Madrid - Steve McMillan - Steffen Mieske - Alessio Mucciarelli - Rainer Spurzem - Anna Lisa Varri - Hans Zinnecker
and many more (including many successful students and young postdocs)

Registration Fee:

The MODEST conferences never asked for a registration fee and we will continue to do so. The conference itself is fully funded and we expect to receive further funding to give travel grants and pay for the social activities. In the unlikely event that we do not receive further funding, we may have to raise a social activity fee, which will be around 100-150 USD. We will write on the receipt 'conference fee' so you might get reimbursed.

Travel grants:

Good news for students as we now can offer free participation (no fee for the social activities) and part travel grants in order of CLP 120,000 (approx. 200 USD). To apply for a travel grant we must receive your registration before the end of November 2014. As more funding will be allocated in the future, the above amount will be a lower limit. (For Chilean students we cover the bus fare + cheap accommodation.) If sufficient money is coming in, we will take the applications of young postdocs and other more senior persons into account.

Social Activities:

We will have a welcome cocktail with early registration on the Sunday afternoon before the conference. The Wednesday afternoon will be free and we offer an interesting excursion to Lota (an old mining town with a lot of history and a wonderful park) including a descend into the Chifflon del Diablo, an old coal mine, which extends under the ocean. On Thursday night we will have a nice conference dinner in a typical Chilean (Patagonian) restaurant.

Special Hotel rate:

The Araucano Hotel in the centre of Concepcion has offered us a special reduced price for the conference participants of CLP 38,000 + 19% IVA (sales tax) for each single or double room per night (CLP 38,000 = approx. USD 65 = approx. 50 Euros). If you are coming from outside of Chile and pay in cash with USD or with a foreign credit card then you do not have to pay IVA!

Flights:

Please book your flight to Chile as soon as possible. At the moment airfares to Chile during the conference are still cheap. The first week of March is just after the main summer holiday period in Chile (February). Therefore, the closer you get to the actual date of the conference the more expensive the flights will be (sometimes about double the amounts we show below). With a quick check on the internet we found the following prices:
LAN Madrid-Santiago direct: approx 1000 Euros
AirFrance Paris-Santiago direct: approx 1200 Euros
American Airlines Miami-Santiago direct: approx. 1400 USD
Delta Airlines Atlanta-Santiago direct: approx. 1600 USD
Air Canada Toronto-Santiago direct: approx. 1400 Can.Dollar
Qantas Sydney-Santiago direct: approx. 2200 Aus.Dollar
Beijing-Santiago (of course not direct): 1400 - 2000 Euros (via US, via Europe or via Australia)
And there are cheaper options (not direct) as well, e.g. from Europe via Brasil (TAM), Peru or Argentina.

SOC: (alphabetical order)

Paulina Assmann (Santiago, Chile, co-chair), Michael Fellhauer (Concepcion, Chile, chair), Douglas Geisler (Concepcion, Chile), Douglas Heggie (Edinburgh, UK), Pavel Kroupa (Bonn, Germany), Steven McMillan (Philadelphia, USA), Steffen Mieske (Santiago, Chile), Simon Portegies-Zwart (Leiden, NL) Rainer Spurzem (Beijing, China)

LOC: (alphabetical order)

Paulina Assmann, Joerg Dabringhausen, Nelvy Choque, Michael Fellhauer, Graeme Candlish, Raul Dominguez, Juan Pablo Farias, Rodrigo Vejar

contact: modest15@astro-udec.cl

We hope to see you all in 2015 !

The MODEST15 team

Newsflash for students: Social fee waived and travel grants available

Thanks to financial support from ESO for MODEST 15, we are able to waive the social activity fee for students. Thus, students can participate in the conference dinner and the conference excursion for free.

Furthermore we have money to award 25 travel grants of 120,000 CLP (approx. 200 USD) for students (and possibly for young postdocs). This will basically cover your stay in a cheap hotel during the conference and the bus fare from Santiago to Concepcion. (Support increases if less people apply.)

To apply for financial support we need to receive your registration before November, 30th.

We will keep you updated whether additional funding becomes available.

MODEST 15 - 1st Announcement

The registration for MODEST 15 is now open.

The Theory Group at the Departamento de Astronomia at the Universidad de Concepcion would like to invite you to MODEST 15, in Concepcion, Chile at the 2nd - 6th of March 2015.

This is the 15. meeting of the MODEST community, which includes groups, all over the world, working in stellar dynamics, stellar evolution, stellar hydrodynamics and the observatitrue forense stellar systems. These systems range from small star clusters, globular clusters, dwarf galaxies to the central areas of large galaxies. The aim is to provide a comprehensive software framework for large-scale simulations of dense stellar systems, within which existing codes for dynamics, stellar evolution, and hydrodynamics can be easily coupled and compared to reality.

The study of dense stellar systems has constantly been an active area of research. Such systems, which mainly refer to young massive star clusters, globular clusters, dwarf galaxies, and galactic centers play a crucial role in understanding the structures of the Universe. Dense systems of stars present enough challenges to basically all schools in astronomy and in all wavelengths and all areas of theory.

For the first time in the MODEST history, this workshop will be helt in Chile. Chile is country best known in astronomy for its clear skies and many of the largest telescopes in the world. What is mainly unknown to the rest of the world is that the government of Chile declared astronomy as one of the key sciences of the country. So a lot of funding is channeled into astronomy and the astronomical community in Chile is constantly growing. This is also true for theoretical astronomy. All mayor universities have now astronomy departments and at least one or more senior scientist in theory.

We think that this makes Chile an ideal place to host the MODEST conference as, in recent years, the acronym changed inoffcially from "Modelling dense stellar systems" into "Modelling and observing dense stellar systems". A lot of observational groups in Chile are working in the field of star clusters.

Scientific topics:

young embedded clusters and star forming regions, globular and open clusters near and far, UCDs, galactic nuclei

contact: modest15@astro-udec.cl

Concepcion is the second largest city in Chile and just a one hour plane ride from Santiago (or 5-6 hours in a luxurious bus). The Universidad de Concepcion (UdeC) is the third most important university in Chile (after Universidad Chile and Catolica, both in Santiago) with a fast growing astronomy department. It is said that our university has the nicest campus at least in Chile if not more. The university is located in the central part of the city and is in walking distance from all hotels in the city centre. Concepcion is located 10 km inland from the Pacific and beaches are easily reached with public transport.

If you come to Chile, we would recommend to plan to stay for a couple of weeks more. Chile is an amazing country which spans more than 5,000 km from the North, with the Atacama desert, to the South (Patagonia and Antarctica). From Santiago it is possible to organise trips to the North and South and from Concepcion you can easily reach Patagonia via plane or bus. At the same time Chile is only about 200 km wide so with a 2 hours bus ride you can travel from ski resorts in the Andes to the beaches of the Pacific.

Things to do in Chile:

• visit Geysirs at over 4,000 m altitude (Atacama)
• climb an active volcano (e.g. Pucon)
• relax in hot springs (all over Chile)
• watch penguins (South) or Llamas (Andes)
• eat excellent meat (everywhere)
• sea food in all varieties (all along the coast)
• make wine tastings (e.g. Valle de Colchagua)
• have a good selection of micro-breweries (everywhere)

AND:

• enjoy the amazing night sky of the Southern Hemisphere !!!

We hope to see you all in 2015

The MODEST15 team

PS: The MODEST conferences never asked for a registration fee and we will continue to do so. The conference itself is fully funded and we expect to receive further funding to invite speakers, give travel grants for students and pay for the social activities. In the unlikely event that we do not receive further funding, we may have to raise a social activity fee, which will be around 100-150 USD. We will write on the receipt 'conference fee' so you might get reimbursed.

PPS: As we do not have a possibility at our institute to host an online registration form and we do not want to outsource confident information, we decided to have an old-fashioned registration form in text-format which you can cut, fill and paste and then please send via e-mail to modest15@astro-udec.cl

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