Another semester has passed by, but this time we had the chance to offer in-person lectures again within a hybrid scheme that keeps the number of students in the lecture hall at reasonable levels. This scheme is a good compromise between institute attendance and safety. But, unfortunately, the Covid-19 story is not over yet and will keep us busy for some more time; infection rates and, sadly, hospitalisations are on the rise again, let alone the 5-10% long covid cases (the EU has about 17 million known cases by now!).
Finally, the recent months saw another wrapped up project I am involved in: Dr. Linke's paper on a model interpretation of higher-order lensing statistics with lens pairs in KiDS data has been accepted by A&A and is now in press. In addition, we had two excellent Bachelor theses that looked at the impact of misalignment between (dark) matter and galaxies inside elliptical matter haloes on this higher-order statistic from the analytical and from a numerical point of view. The few percent effect of misalignment will be tough to detect but may be observable with future deep full-sky galaxy surveys. The Euclid space telescope is getting close to delivering these data: the planned launch year is 2023!