From 23 to 27 January 2017 the second Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) meeting was held in Sitges, Spain. During this meeting the state of Gaia was discussed and preparations for the second data release took place. Bringing together this many members from all over Europe provided for the opportunity to meet colleagues and discuss hot topics face to face.

The first scientific results from Gaia DR1 were presented and it is impressive to see that more than 30 papers were published using Gaia data within 4 months after the release.

Next to a number of presentations given by the DPAC chair, Gaia Project Scientist and each of the Coordination Units (CU), splinters were organised to discuss and brainstorm on a variety of topics such as scientific interfaces, the validation of the data, the documentation and the outreach for Gaia data release 2.

In January 1988 the second Hipparcos INCA meeting was held in Sitges, Spain as well. Figure 3 shows the participants of this Hipparcos "INCA" Consortium meeting (INCA stands for INput CAtalogue). Hipparcos was the first astrometric mission ever launched and also an ESA mission. Next to INCA there were two other Hipparcos consortia working in parallel for the data analysis, and one for analysing the "Tycho" data.  This led to the Tycho-2 catalogue that was completed in 2000 and contains a total of 2,539,913 stars.

A number of participants to the 2017 Sitges DPAC meeting were already involved in Hipparcos and present at the 1988 Hipparcos meeting: Jordi Torra and Catherine Turon (the two organisers of the 1988 meeting), and also Frédéric Arenou, Christine Ducourant, Francesca Figueras and Carme Jordi.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Catherine Turon, Eduard Masana

[Published: 31/01/2017]