We had a coffee meeting this morning... I came in a bit late and the Director of the AAO was talking about some projects in progress in the Gemini Observatory. It went something like this, 'Well, the proposals for Gemini is that there is a competition between HERNIA and PERVS, so they'll need to split their efforts...'

What? HERNIA? PERVS? One thing which I noticed about astronomers is this: they like to contrive really silly acronyms for things. I found this website called DOOFAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms).

Here are some of my favourites:

2D-FRUTTI: 2-D Photon Counting System (I swear, I didn't make this up)
ANIS: All Neutrino Interaction Simulation (LOL!)
BAD: Balmer-Absorption-Dominated (Nuclei)
BICEP: Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (feel the burn)
CANGAROO: Collaboration between Australian and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory in the Outback (krazy!)
COLA: Compact Objects in Low power Agns
GOD: Gravity One Dimension (The paper was entitled `The likelihood of GODs' existence'...)
HIS/HERS: High Intensity Spectrograph / High Energy Range Spectrometer
HO-BAGS: Hubble Observatory BAckground Galaxy Survey
HOEs: Holographic Optical Elements
MACHO: MAssive Compact Halo Objects
MIRACLE: Mid-InfraRed Array Camera of Least Effort
OWL: Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (so big, it's ridiculous)
PIG: Partially Ionized Globule
PINOCCHIO: PINpointing Orbit-Crossing Collapsed HIerarchial Objects (Egad!)
POOPSY: Phase One Observing Proposal SYstem
SAURON: Spectroscopic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae (mmmm, nerdy)
SMIRFS: Sub Millimeter InfraRed Fiber-feed System (or something)
SPIFFI: SPectrometer for Infrared Faint Field Imaging
T-RECS: Thermal REgion Camera System
YORIC: Yet another Optimal Resolution Image Constructor (Alas...)

These are NOT made up....I recognise several acronyms I know of which are real. So, it would appear that astronomers have way too much time on their hands...must be while waiting for bad weather to clear during observations...