The Sieve and the Sand: Adventures at Kitt Peak aka Sunset Gallery

From July 22-27, I was at Kitt Peak, observing on the 2.1m! Unfortunately, this time of year is monsoon season in the southwest... :( We were clouded out 3/5 nights I was at the scope. The 2.1m was the only telescope open on the mountain, because everyone else does maintenance this time of year... THEY know it's crappy weather... We got to open twice though, and I even got to take some spectra of some AGN! :) I didn't take a lot of photos, except of the sunsets I saw. The best will be posted here, so get ready for a barrage of sunsets!

The first three nights I was there we used FLAMINGOS (some long acronym for Florida something infrared something). It was a grism, so you could do both spectroscopy (my favorite! lines that go up and down) and photometry (pretty pictures). All these nights were cloudy/rainy so we never got to open the dome and take data :( Whatever did the astronomers do instead?

Well, we watched Contact, Land Before Time, played lots of cards, looked at cute kitty pictures, played the Pokemon card game, watched storms roll over the mountains, studied for the GRE, read books, and walked to the cafeteria to eat cookies. Yeah. Astronomy rules.

What did I do during the day? SLEPT of course! When I went up to the mountain in June with Jenny, Eric and Con, I was utterly unprepared for the nocturnal life, so I remedied that this time. I spent the few days before I was headed up to the mountain slowly adjusting myself to staying up late. It worked well, and I had no trouble turning nocturnal!

My schedule for FLAMINGOS days was: wake up at ~2 or 3pm, wander around the mountain entertaining myself, fill the 12-hour liquid nitrogen dewar at 4 (keeps the telescope electronics cold to reduce noise!), eat "dinner" at 5, head back to the telescope at 7 to fill the 24-hour dewar, watch the sunset, then wait in sadness for the skies to clear up... For the last 2 nights I was there we used GoldCam (literally, gold), an optical spectrograph. Things cleared up these nights, so I got to take some pretty spectra of some X-ray sources (hopefully AGN!).

So excited to fill the dewar with liquid nitrogen!

We kept having problems starting with GCam: the telescope ran away twice (meaning, it started moving on its own, and wouldn't stop moving until we pressed the big red emergency button...) and our HeNeAr (helium neon argon) lamp burnt out :( Without taking spectra of the lamp, something that we know what the emission lines are supposed to look like, it's very difficult to calibrate the wavelength scale of spectra taken of science objects. But all in all, we got use-able data, but not much of it due to calibration issues and off and on clouds.

Phil and Nick in front of the WIYN 3.5m (where I observed last time!)

Not a bad view, huh? :)

Finally opening the dome!!!!! :)

Notable activities while on the mountain:
-Went running a couple times. Probably the worst idea I've ever had. Nowhere to go on the top of a mountain but down, and of course, BACK UP.
-Found a rec room that is in an old army bunker. It had pool tables, snacks, and a huge TV loaded with home-recorded VHS tapes.
-Randomly ran into the NAU (Northern Arizona University) REU students (the REU I did last year!!!!) and showed them around the mountain. One of them is from IU!
-Met some University of Arizona students who showed me the 90" telescope they were using. One of them almost got struck by lightning when we were standing on the catwalk!
-Said UA students invited me to go observing with them on Mt. Lemmon, about 1 hour from east of Tucson.
-For the first time of my life, WON A GAME OF POOL.
-Had a guitar jam session on the 2.1m catwalk at 4 in the morning.

Now, enjoy lots of sunsets from the 2.1m catwalk! :)