On 20th December 2013, the 68th Session of UN General Assembly proclaimed 2015 as International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL 2015).

During 2015, in every country there were some events about “light”, such as “What is photonic”, Energy, Economic Impact, Lighting the Built Environment and “Connecting the world”. On 12nd December 2015, at Astronomical Observatory of Capodimonte in Naples, there was the final event of the International Year of Light where EUROAVIA Napoli “Umberto Nobile” was invited: we had special reservation for 35 members.

Evening started with welcome speech of Director of Observatory, Professor Masssimo della Valle, talking about history and future of stars science. Then, the first guest participated, Paolo de Bernardis, Professor of Astrophysics at University of Rome “La Sapienza”. 

His speech “ La luce del big bang” ( Big Bang Light) ,was about the birth of stars and comets, since the down of the Universe. Following, the second guest was Francesca Esposito, astronomer at the observatory. She is also the Principal Investigator of DREAMS project, Dust characterisation, Risk assessment, and Environment Analyser on the Martian Surface. “DREAMS is a small meteorological station that will measure local weather conditions at the landing site, such as temperature, humidity, pressure, dust opacity, wind speed and wind direction. It will also perform measurements of the electrical properties of the Martian atmosphere, the first time this has ever been done”, she said. Moreover, other European institutes or organisations were involved in this project: CNRS-LATMOS (France), ESA-ESTEC, Oxford University (UK), Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) – Helsinki (Finland) and INTA 

(Spain).The Italian Space Agency (ASI) is the lead funding agency
with Raffaele Mugnuolo as Programme Manager. Evening endend with a guest star: Italian Astronaut Major Luca Parmitano. He talked about his mission on the ISS showing us some photos shooted by him on board of the International Space Station from May 2013 to November 2013. Then, he remarked about our “special mission” on Earth: to preserve the earth as a planet, using our social conscience because we have only one planet.

Alessandra Schaivone, AS Napoli Former Treasurer