Ulrich Bastian - Gaia

Gaia People

Ulrich Bastian

Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Heidelberg

Uli Bastian was staff astronomer at ARI, Heidelberg, where he co-authored the FK5, PPM, Hipparcos and Tycho star catalogues. He entered the Hipparcos project in 1983, when the preparations for the data treatment had just started. He mainly worked on the Tycho data reduction, but contributed to the Input Catalogue and the main-grid reductions as well.

He was part of the Gaia community from its beginnings in 1992/3, and had worked full time for Gaia since 2002. He was a member of the Gaia Science Team (2003-2007) and of the DPAC Executive (2005-2016). Until his retirement in 2017 he was leading the preparations and execution of the `Core Processing' part of Gaia's data reduction.

Since then he has remained active in the DPAC consortium, especially in the astrometric work for Gaia DR2 and DR3.

Uli's scientific hobbies include variable stars, galactic structure, the popularisation of astronomy - and field research on butterflies. His most active non-scientific hobby is dancing, especially Argentine tango.

[Published: 13/06/2005 - Updated: 30/01/2020]