Winter Traveling

Long time no see!

This winter I drove to Indiana with my fellow Hoosier Katie. It's a long drive, and fairly boring after leaving the mountains in Maryland. We spent around 8 long hours driving through dreary weather.
Click on pics to enlarge and see them in all their glory!

Quite a long interstate, 70.

Frost line in MD mountains

Frozen waterfall in MD

States traveled through, plus MD of course :)

Indiana! I got to see my Mom's new house for the first time, which thankfully has a spare bedroom. No more sleeping on a couch ;)

I got to visit Bloomington for a reunion with IU friends, and even got to see a basketball game in Assembly Hall!

Go Hoosiers!

Most of my time was spent catching up sleep, internet-ing, Netflix-ing, and seeing my family for holidays. It's so strange coming home ~twice a year and seeing how much my nieces and nephews have grown!!

This year I managed to secure some funding from STScI to attend the AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting in Seattle. So, I went to leg 2 of my winter traveling- the Pacific Northwest!

Nice sunset on my flight from Dallas to Seattle.

Seattle was the location of my first AAS back in 2011, so it was fun to go back and visit! Seattle is a fun city with lots of great food and attractions, but dang it, my hair does not appreciate the humidity...

Most of my days were spent conference-ing, which mostly consists of getting up early, attending talks and poster sessions, shmoozing with other astronomers, running into so-and-so from a few years ago (astronomy is a small field, we all know each other...), and generally chatting astronomy and non-astronomy with friends new and old. Of course I did have to do some real work ;) ... I presented a poster about some data reduction methods I tested. I even got to meet the creator of the HST instrument I work on :)

I also got to try some awesome food and drinks at some of Seattle's restaurants and bars. Working for a government contractor has its perks- we get a GSA per diem, which is something like $70/day for food!! Some of my favorites were:

• Bathtub Gin, a very hard to find and easy to miss speakeasy-style bar with a great atmosphere and excellent cocktails
• Pike Brewing Company bar & restaurant, I had an amazing grilled cheese, and they have several yummy in-house brewed beers
• Taphouse Grille, they have 100+ beers on tap from all over
• Elysium Brewing
• Von's 1000 spirits, faaaaabulous scratch-made pasta, and amazing selection of liquor which they use to make delicious cocktails
• La Creperie Voila, a food stand outside the convention center. Looks meh but has perfectly-made sweet and savory crepes prepared by personable employees

Roberto flew from LA to meet me in Seattle 3 days into the conference. There is a tradition that on the 2nd to last day of the conference a large party is held at a local bar. These parties are always sooo much fun! Imagine hundreds of dork astronomers trying to dance... it was no less of a spectacle than usual this year! It's always the highlight of the conference to attend these parties. Bars usually host us pretty well (how often do you get 500+ space nerds in your bar?) by creating space-themed drinks or showing NASA TV/astronomy movies. This year they displayed astronomy paper proceedings and posters on projectors, ha! 

After the conference ended (Thursday), Roberto and I met up with our friend Jeff, who was also attending the conference. Jeff lives across the Puget Sound in Bremerton. So, we headed down to the pier and caught a ferry. 

Roberto, Jeff, and me waiting for the ferry to arrive

It was a rare beautiful and sunny day in Seattle! Perfect weather for enjoying the sight as we trekked across the Sound.

View from the ferry

On the ferry's deck, watching the ferry headed to Bainbridge. Mountains!!

Seattle skyline from the ferry

Mt. Rainier

Sunset as we arrive in Bremerton

Once we landed in Bremerton, it was a short walk to Jeff and his husband Nick's house. They have a nice house with an extra bedroom they let us take. Jeff is a hardcore-brewer who even had a kegarator (keg with refrigerator) in his living room for us to pour freshly brewed beers! Nick occupies the other aspect of gardening, cooking, and canning, so we got to have some of his food products as well. Jeff and Roberto went to grad school together, and two of their other grad school buddies came over (who also attended the conference). We spent a fun night playing cards and sipping Jeff's beers.

The next day we slept in and explored Bremerton. The USS Turner Joy, a Navy destroyer ship from the 50's that was built in Bremerton is retired there and open for tour. We spent the afternoon exploring the very expansive ship. It is self-guided tour that allows you to access most parts of ship.

USS Turner Joy

Keep Cool; DO'NT GIVE UP THE SHIP.

After that, we walked along the docks enjoying the sunset. It got chilly soon, so we headed home. 

Sunset on the docks

We all went out to dinner to the Silver City Restaurant. They had amazing in-house beers (noticing a pattern?) and I had some amazing Tillamook mac 'n cheese. 

Saturday we got up early and took the ferry back to Seattle. We walked around the infamous Pike Place Market (even saw some flying fish!). We bought some fresh salmon and veggies to grill later. 

All the seafoodz

We headed up to the Space Needle after that to catch a Duck Tour. Well. Our guide was absolutely RIDICULOUS, but it was a fun and convenient way to get a whirlwind tour of Seattle. It was fun to ride the duck into Lake Union. Also, we all got duck calls that I annoyed Roberto, Jeff, and Nick with all day (and the next day).

A foggy/rainy day in Seattle?!?! I'm SHOCKED!

Gas Works, as seen from the duck boat on Lake Union

After that, we took a bus to Pioneer Square to go on the Seattle Underground Tour. This was probably my favorite part of the day. The history of Seattle is fascinating, and the whole "city under a city" thing is mind-blowing. There is wikipedia page for it here. We had a great tour guide to boot.

Underground Tour

The original wooden sewer pipes used in Seattle circa 1854

Afterwards, thoroughly tired, we went back to the ferry station to get back to Bremerton. The ferry is about an hour long, so by the time we got back, we were all too tired to cook or go out. We ordered pizza and watched the NFL playoff games ;)

Sunday, our last day there, was spent relaxing at home, and I got to watch the Colts kick Peyton's butt. For dinner we grilled up the salmon and veggies we bought in Seattle. Then Roberto and I packed up our suitcases and trudged back to the ferry to return to Seattle to catch our flight home to Baltimore. 

Seattle skyline at night from the ferry

Ferris Wheel makes cool reflections, ooooh

We took a red-eye, with a layover in Boston. This was my first red-eye in the US (overnight trans-atlantic flights shouldn't count!). Never. Again. It was awful, I couldn't sleep, was uncomfortable, and grumpy. Boo. Finally I stepped back in my apartment after 3 weeks away to a crazy Moka who my neighbor/co-worker had been cat-sitting.

Phew, what a trip! It was great to go home and then visit Seattle again- it's a great city that is also very vegetarian-friendly considering its reputation for seafood ;) But it's always nice to return to your own bed, own shower, and own kitty :)

Quote of the Day (WARNING nerd jokes)

12:53 me: my supply of fudge striped cookies is dwindling

  THAT'S what i need to stock up on for the hurricane

 Roberto: hahaha

  i'm buying stuff to make hurricanes today.

 me: yessss

 Roberto: light rum, dark rum, pineapple juice, orange juice.

12:54 me: my friend is a meteorologist and he went to the weather version of AAS and they gave everybody there free hurricanes

 Roberto: nice.

12:55 we need to come up with some kind of astronomy drink.

  like the dark matter shot or something.

12:57 me: yeah, and everyone will always ask each other and the bartender, what is this made of?

  they'll just shrug and say WIMPs?

12:58 Roberto: hahahaha

  machos

12:59 WIMPS = whiskey……melon, patron

 me: hahahahahaha

  legit lol'ing right now

13:00 Roberto: whiskey, ice, melon juice, patron

 me: that actually sounds a bit unpleasant

- Talking about the upcoming Hurricane Sandy due to hit the mid-Atlantic soon.

Yowzah Kids, It's The Scope!

Wow. How lame is it to update your blog with events that took place about 3 months ago? Actually, don't answer that. Get ready for a burst of posts.

In favor of my laziness, I will whirlwind you through some exciting times that I forgot to post about while in Arizona. First on the list is observing on Mt. Lemmon with a couple of UA students I met at Kitt Peak (funny how astronomy works...!) Actually, I already knew one of them from the AAS meeting in January, so that makes this whole "observing with strangers" thing less sketchy, right?

This story begins with Harry Potter, and seeing the movie at midnight. Actually, that has no influence on this post, but I thought I would include it regardless.The following Friday night, after a birthday sushi dinner with the other interns, I met the UA students in a shady alley in south Tucson (almost as bad as Detroit). OK, I'm kidding!!! But I did meet some strangers (I knew one) and together me and three other UA students headed up out of Tucson and into the surrounding mountain range en route to Mt. Lemmon which houses the UA telescopes. I'll spare you all the astronomy details, but we were observing exoplanets on the Steward Observatory (astronomy department at UA) Kuiper 61".

The 61" dome.

We played a fair amount of Jenga, rummy, and boggle (I just want to very humbly point out that I won all of the above), as well as stargazing, coffee drinking, and watching youtube videos. Good times with good people (what astronomers aren't good people?!).

Jenga about to come down!!! Ruh-roh.

Also, Kuiper was buried at the bottom of this telescope! The only indication of this is a rock at the base in tribute to a great astronomer.(I love parentheses today, it seems).
Quick astro plug, Kuiper is known for his discoveries of both a Uranus and Neptune satellite. He also founded the LPL at UA!! (Lunar and Planetary Lab, which does NOT like to associate itself with the "normal" astronomy dept- Steward... geez, astronomy drama) He helped select the landing sites for the Apollo missions, and is the namesake for which the Kuiper Belt is named after! A pretty rad dude in my book.

Anyway, I slept in a very... rustic dorm, woke up, explored the mountain a bit, and we eventually drove back down later that day! Wreaked enormous havoc on my sleep schedule- I had just gotten back to diurnal when I decided to go observing again... And made some new friends! :)

And now for some pictures! Enjoy.

Such a nice homey dorm building.

DAY SLEEPERS (astronomers are zombies)

The liquid nitrogen dewar... the tube froze solid in that position, just floating in the air! NEAT!

We found this "Heistmobile". Astronomers are taking over the world!!!

Not a bad view, eh? 

A monsoon dumps on the city of Tucson below.

Hoodoos exist in Tucson too!!! Fun rock structure on the drive down the mountain.

NM-Chapter 2 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Scope

Telescopes, telescopes, telescopes! Get ready!

To continue the New Mexico adventure, July 5th we took off early to Socorro, NM to see the Very Large Array, or VLA. The VLA is an array of 27 (technically 28, but one is always being worked on) 25m radio dishes in a Y configuration. The scopes can be moved on tracks to be closer or farther apart, depending on whether or not you want high resolution images or images that span a large field of view. At their maximum separation, the baseline is 36km! An array of multiple telescopes acts like one big telescope with a diameter the size of the baseline- so essentially when you spread the telescopes out over a 36km distance, you are making a 36km wide telescope dish! The technique of using multiple telescopes to gain better resolution is called interferometry, and it's crazy complicated and only in my wildest dreams do I someday hope to understand the Fourier transforms that make it possible...

Anyway, we drove out to the VLA and got an all-access (well, not really, but more than than the average tourist!) tour.

First glimpse of the VLA! Look at all those dishes!

SO EXCITED FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY.

I forget what this array was called, but they were long wavelength scopes.
Yes, those are telescopes!

The crawler that moved the scopes was amazing in itself. To make a turn it lowers jacks onto the ground, picks itself (AND the 230 ton telescope!) and turns 90 degrees, then lowers back down to the tracks! It moves at little over walking speed...

The machine that moves the huge 230 ton radio dishes!
A work of engineering beauty.

We got to walk on top of the radio dish! Shhhh, don't tell... :)

The dizzying view from the edge of the dish! It was pretty scary.

And, of course, I had to take the obligatory Contact photo. Every astronomer has to have seen this movie, no?!

Me as Jodie Foster and Nick as my Matthew McConaughey.

The next day it was off to Sunspot, NM to see the National Solar Observatory (NSO). Our first stop was Big Dome, a solar telescope built in the 50's! They still use it! In astronomy, that's old :P

Big Dome solar telescope. The outside mirrors that capture sunlight!

Next up was the Dunn Solar Telescope, or DST. This thing was pretty impressive. It is one of the leading solar telescopes in the world. It rises 40-some meters in the air, and goes 60m underground! We got to walk around inside and underground, but it was dark and I didn't get any good photos.

DST!

The road that leads to the NSO is called 6563, because astronomers have the best sense of humor. 6563Angstroms (or 10^-10 m!) is the wavelength of Hα, the transition when an electron falls from an excited (n=3 if you really care) state to a lower state (n=2) in an hydrogen atom. Hα traces ionized gas in clouds, so it can tell us where stars are being formed! Basically, it's just a very important line in astronomy :P

 6563, and us trying (and failing) to make the angstrom symbol...

After we went around the NSO, we took the quick trip to Apache Point Observatory (APO), across the way from NSO. APO is where the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope is.

SDSS scope.

The SDSS is a huge revolutionary project that began in 2000. It is a redshift survey (redshift=distance to an object) that's covered something like 30-some% of the sky! They have photometry (images) for 500 million objects and spectra for 1 million!!! (I've used SDSS data in multiple research projects before!) Basically, it is a totally awesome survey and has given the astronomy community lots of data and insight into the large-scale structure of the Universe.

The hundreds of spectrograph plates that  were HANDMADE and labeled for the SDSS!

The view from the SDSS catwalk. That's White Sands Nat'l Monument in the background!

Finally, after many telescope tours and way too much science to remember, we headed back to Sunspot to hang out with the NSO REU students for the night. Then back to Cloudcroft to sleep, and finally the drive back to Tucson the next morning! We arrived back just in time for the first big monsoon of the year.

The monsoon's aftermath, and a nice sunset. :)

Sorry for all the gritty astronomy details, but don't you feel a little smarter now? :) To reward you for sitting through it, here's a pretty astronomy picture: a Hubble Deep Field image. THESE GALAXIES ARE 12 BILLION YEARS OLD!!!! (The Universe is 13.7 billion years old) :):):)

I love astronomy!

Astronomers Do It At Night

Over winter break I went to Seattle for the AAS conference. It lasted from the Sunday immediately before classes to that Thursday. Because of this, I skipped the first week of school. At first it sounded alright- in fact I was a bit excited (come on, don't tell me you're not excited when a class got canceled?) Once I emailed all my professors and got homework for the week though, I wasn't really too keen on the idea of missing the first five days of class...

I presented a poster over my research from last summer at NAU. It was great- lots of interesting and stimulating people came around and asked me about my research. I met a lot of really cool people- astronomers and students alike.

Alec, Jenny and I in front of my poster!

Last year Chris went to AAS in DC and whenever I called he always told me how tired he was and how busy he was the whole time. At the time, I had a hard time believing that you could be busy all day at an astronomy conference... Yeahhhh, how wrong I was. Talks started at 9 in the morning and lasted until about 5. There were a few invited talks each day that almost everyone attended (big conference rooms, well-known astronomers speaking), and in between those were special session talks over specific areas of astronomy that were smaller. And going on all day in the exhibit hall was the poster session where people like me stood next to their poster all day waiting for people to come by and look. The conference in general was socially tiring, but worth it.

After the "conference day" was over, I would be invited to dinner with someone from somewhere, or I went to scheduled dinners. After dinner was drinks, after drinks was talking, after talking was finally getting back to the hotel to pass out in bed. Lather, rinse, repeat!

I did get to go out while there as well. We went to Pike Place Market...

One evening we went to the Space Needle. It was really neat to see the city at night!

Nicole (from my REU!), me, Teresa and Jenny at the top of the space needle.

We went to Chinatown for lunch one day and got dim sum (only two vegetarian options... sad...) We also went to the original Starbucks! Not that exciting really, but I had to go out of principle. One evening I visited University of Washington and got to talk to their grad students and faculty about grad school (eek!) and see the department. I also went for a run down on the waterfront...

And got lost on the way back. After the conference ended, Jenny and I stayed until the following Sunday, bring our trip length to a whole week. We had planned this out months ago, and in hindsight I probably should have come back to school as soon as possible to get back in the groove of classes and catch up on what I missed, buuuuut... how many chances do you have to go to Seattle (paid for, no less)?

Things we did:
-Visit the EMP (Experience Music Project) and Science Fiction Museum (a music and science nerd's dream come true)
-Eat at Top Pot Donuts
-Went to the market again
-Visited the Fremont Troll (a huge stone troll under the Fremont bridge!)
-Went to the Erotic Bakery... haha. It was very interesting.

That was about it. Two nights Jenny and I stayed with a friend of Alec's, and the last night we stayed with Keaton (he did an REU at Indiana and stayed through early September). Then on Sunday we left early to catch a bus to SeaTac airport and from there it was back home. After a layover in Minneapolis, I made it back to Indy about midnight and then drove back to Bloomington.

All in all, Seattle was great! I could do without the weather and the extremely poorly-designed road systems... but the stores, restaurants and nightlife were diverse and unique. Skipping the first week of school? Not one of my best ideas, but I had a great time anyway. Hopefully next year I'll get to go to AAS again!