[Weltevreden SA (Dana)]

Wow, Robert, thanks again for the leads to Mr. Freeman's papers. You're certainly spot-on about his stature in astrophysics in general and stellar pops in particular. I looked him up on The Usual Suspects (arXiv, IOP, Simbad & pals) and was delighted to see he's done major and very recent research on our MW bulge. A fortuitous find for me, as I'm in the middle of reading up on the bulge globulars & their metals/distribution. About 10 days ago we had several really good nights over here. I gave NGC 6256, 6380, Ton 2, and HP1 a shot, and was delighted to bag all in one night. N6256 has been one of my favorites for a long time because my 180mm and 200mm can resolve about 10-15 right at the edge of seeing (vm14.5 - 15.5). It's a grand sight: the higher the power the less the faint subluminal glow and the more the specks. Now, armed with Mr. Freeman's bulge data, I can better put these and other bulge globulars in the same picture. A fun winter project will be to log all the bulge globs and then go back to read his papers again.

I can see why he's so keen to ferret astroseismology data out of the red clump stars there. At metallicities apparently falling into two pops of [Fe/H] < -0.5 and + 0.15, these RGB clumps point to the bulge having a much more complex history than suspected. Harder data on the borders of those stellar pops will be most welcome in his group.

I wonder what software they use to weed out IR and speckle chatter in astroseismology involving such remote and dense fields. I always thought ASM was useful to only about 1 or 2 kpc out and relatively nondense fields.

=Thanks again, Dana