Dario Maccagni

I have been a member of the Italian Communist Party and Regional Secretary of the CGIL Sindacato Ricerca in the late seventies and early eighties. Politically, I still define myself a follower of the late Enrico Berlinguer.
 

I always worked at IFCTR (now IASF-MI) after my degree, but for a few short periods spent at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK, at the CfA, Cambridge, Mass., at home on paternity leave, and at ESO. I got interested in many topics, starting with cosmic ray electrons, then moving to X-ray astronomy, AGNs, clusters of galaxies and cosmology. I did some experimental work, but finally settled on observational astronomy. I confess I like observing at telescopes and analyzing data, and I believe that observations must be the back-bone of astronomy and cosmology.

These are my papers I love most:

• Maccagni, D. & Tarenghi, M.: "X-ray observations of six BL Lacertae fields", 1981, ApJ 243, 42, which established BL Lac Objects as a class of X-ray sources;
• Maccacaro, T., Maccagni, D. & Tarenghi, M.: "The X-ray spectra of the BL Lacertae objects PKS 0548 - 322 and 3C 66A", 1983, ApJ 273, 70, the first published x-ray spectra of BL Lac objects;
• Tarenghi, M., Garilli, B. & Maccagni, D.: "Galaxy structures in the Hercules region", 1994, AJ 107, 1629, a novel description of galaxy structures in a large sky area;
• Maccagni, D., Garilli, B. & Tarenghi, M.: "The complex structure of Abell 2151 (Hercules)", 1995, AJ 109, 465, a thorough study of the dynamics of this cluster separated into morphological types.