Starting a conference on April 1st could lead to hundreds of practical jokes but I only managed to spot one in a talk by Paul Roche of Cardiff University. He included a slide listing his some of his collaborators as J. Harkness, G. Cooper, I. Jones, O. Harper and T. Sato of the Torchwood Institute.

At the Virtual Observatory session - more on that later - Ryan Scranton of Google Inc had been due to give a talk titled “Using Google Sky as a Science Tool” but it had been cancelled due to “a major release coming up”. The subject of the major release wasn’t explained but I assume it wasn’t related to the April 1st announcement that Google and Virgin were creating Virgle to establish a human base on Mars.