The giant awakes …

… and ATLAS has seen its first beam splash events. Or in other words beams are passing by the machine! Here’s a picture and an animation of two of the first events from last night …
Of course CERN has released an official press release on the restart of the LHC. They also offer a CERN twitter tweet now. For those you who care and know what it is. More footage (that will be kept updated) can be found on the ATLAS Event Display web page.
Just in case you don’t fully understand … this is quite exciting! At least for someone in the field of particle physics … and this is just the beginning (hopefully) … it’s gonna be great.