Core Dump

I've neglected this blog yet again. Here is an undetailed list of my recent activities through the passage of photos. Click on pictures for larger images!

I got pie'd for the physics club's annual Pie a Professor fundraiser where we auction the chance to pie a professor in the face. My lab professor did this... At least I was raising money for the club. :P

I went to IU's Little 500 bike race for the first time. It's an IU tradition that I thought I should see once before graduating!

I went observing for 5 nights in March, at Kitt Peak in my second home, Arizona! There was more snow than I had seen the whole winter in Indiana :P

I saw some beautiful sunsets up there, and we were open 4/5 nights, closed one due to high winds!

Look at those mountain layers!!!!

I brought my sister's SLR camera with me and took some nice photos of the pristine skies up there at 7000ft! The photo above is the dome of my telescope for 3 nights, the 2.1m. The other 2 nights I was at the 0.9m telescope.

The bright city lights light up the 4m dome across the mountain top. 

 

I graduated!!!! Elaine and I on graduation day, behind our home away from homes, Swain West, the physics & astronomy building. 

 My best friend Naomi graduated from Purdue! :)

I got an SLR camera for graduation! It's a Canon Rebel T2i and I love it. I use it mainly to take photos of cats, but occasionally photograph people too, I guess. That's a picture of my sister's cat, Chips (I think?)

Sister's cat Fish (I think?)

My baby, Moka Latte!

Moka being cute.

I made lemon meringue for my good friend Jesse's birthday. I was nervous I would ruin it but it turned out DELICIOUS. I got the recipe from allrecipes, can be found here.

My good friend, Nick, came to visit Indiana from Arizona, and him and his girlfriend (and my fellow astronomy major at IU!) Teresa visited me for a day. All three of us were in the REU in Flagstaff together, and now they are most disgustingly cute couple ever!

My little sister, Lizzy, graduated from high school! 

I went to Baltimore for an interview with Space Telescope Science Institute... I GOT THAT JOB! :)

In the words of my favorite band, Rush, and their song Prime Mover:

From the point of ignition
To the final drive
The point of the journey
Is not to arrive--
Anything can happen!

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.

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! :)

Night 1... rainbow!

Enjoying the sunset :)

Night 1.

Night 3...

Night 4... (4m telescope in foreground!) 

Night 5. WIYN telescopes in foreground.

Night 5. Smooth and uninteresting sunset = observing tonight!

Two No Trump

So much to say, so little inspiration to type it all out. Let's just say I've had less than enough motivation to write a blog post as of late...

Okay, let's start at the beginning, shall we? Two weeks ago the REU students were scheduled to visit Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) to tour the mountain and see a few of the telescopes. On Thursday I realized that Jenny, Eric, and their advisor Con just happened to be on the mountain for an observing run through IU. I was thinking it would be fun to say hi to them while I was there on Friday, so I emailed them seeing if we could coordinate a quick hello. Just minutes after I emailed them, though, Ken (the REU director) came in and asked if I knew Con Deliyannis. After dozens of cheeky comebacks involving the personality of Con Deliyannis ran through my head, I answered simply yes. Ken and Con had a series of last-minute conversations and it was suggested that I could stay the night at KP with the IU peeps. I of course said YES.

So I packed some things for a night and off we went on Friday to see the observatories. On my (first) round on the mountain, the first thing we saw was the solar observatory, including being able to walk around in it.

The Solar Observatory and Solis!

The sun in a mirror.

Peace! My shadow from the sun.

Next up was the 2.1meter telescope (we will be using this next month!) and the Coude spectrograph.

Brittany and Vivienne in front of the 2.1m.

On the 2.1m catwalk. The 4m dome in the background!!

Afterwards we went to the WIYN 3.5m scope. WIYN is a consortium consisting of Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale, and NOAO (whom I work for). They have 2 telescopes- .9 and 3.5m. So IU essentially owns a large share of the those two scopes. As such, our grad students and faculty get a fair amount of observing time with them. Con, Jenny and Eric were currently up on a 5-day observing run at the 3.5m. The 3.5 (more affectionately known as 'big WIYN') is, for lack of a better word, a totally awesome telescope. It was built 15ish years ago and the advanced technology and mirror and mount design make it the best science telescope on the mountain (more so than the larger 4m telescope!) It houses the WHIRC infrared camera and Hydra, a mulit-fibre spectrograph. Enough gushing :P Here are some photos during our visit...

Gahhh, infinite reflections in the 3.5 primary and secondary mirrors!

TO Charles explains the telescope optics and electronics. Check out those actuators!!

Next up was the 4m Mayall telescope, finished in 1970. Words cannot adequately explain the scale of this telescope. Even though it is only half a meter larger than big WIYN, is far larger, and the dome weighs nearly 500 tons. 500 TONS! The primary mirror (4m) weighs 15 tons alone! There is a huge equatorial mount supporting the mirror. this is by far the largest (reflecting) telescope I've ever seen!

The HUGE 4m equatorial mount! See Phil for scale in bottom left.

That ended our official tour, and I was subsequently dropped off with Jenny as the rest of the REU's left the mountain. Right before they left me though, I asked Ken how I would be getting home the next day. He looked quizzically at me and said he thought I was coming home with Con and his students. They weren't leaving until Monday, though, and I had no other way off the mountain. Ken again suggested, hey, do you want to stay with them until Monday? Again- YES. So it was quickly arranged that I would be staying in the observers' dorms until Monday (working for NOAO has its perks- like being able to use NOAO resources on the fly).

Eric eclipsing the sun with his large girth.

Jenny Power-Posing. 

Arizona is colonized once more!!

But anyway, I spent the next few days observing with them on the 3.5m. This was my first time ever observing using a telescope larger than I am tall. Also, the first time I've had to adjust to a nocturnal schedule. Last year in Flagstaff we got to use the Anderson Mesa telescopes, but bailed out early due to weather. Yeah, let's just say becoming nocturnal was kind of rough. Especially because I wasn't really anticipating going observing until the day before it happened. The first night I just powered through (with the help of 5 cups of coffee!), staying up until 5:30am, then sleeping until 11:30am. The next two nights were much easier after that. The life of an observing astronomer goes: wake up at ~2/3pm, eat 'breakfast', go to the telescope ~5 to start taking calibrations and checking things out. Watch the sunset. Take data observations. Go to sleep at 5:30. Lather, rinse, repeat!

My dorm building. Shhh! Nocturnal astronomers!!

Con was observing an open cluster, needing very high resolution spectra, so we were taking 2-hour exposures. That leaves a lot of downtime. Plus, apparently the 3.5m is important enough that they don't really trust astronomers with the telescope, so instead they have a telescope operator, or TO. So, that left a LOT of downtime. What do 3 college students and a professor do all night while observing on top of a mountain?

THIS. Make Eric look like Two-Face in the light of sunset. I love my friends.

Play bridge of course. But seriously, Con taught us how to play bridge. Let me just revoke all previous bridge and old people jokes I have ever made. I am superbly impressed that old people can play bridge (if that stereotype is even true to begin with). It is by far the most complex and intellectually involved card game I have ever played. Hands down. It is also immensely fun, especially when you have tons of cafeteria cookies to eat. We also went out and watched the sunset each night, hoping to see a green flash,  and also just to enjoy the beautiful sunsets from the mountain.

Sunset from Kitt Peak.

The 4m at dusk.

Anyway, we had great weather for the run- one night we even got down to .5" seeing!!! I'm not even going to explain what that means besides saying that it was REALLY clear and you get a lot of flux (light). Excellent seeing also means excellent stargazing. I can honestly say I have never seen so many stars before in any other location. Last summer we got a lot of great skies on our camping trips, but I think Kitt Peak trumps them all. It was utterly astounding, and impossible to communicate to you how amazing the skies were. I could see details of the Milky Way I didn't even know existed. And lots of meteors (aka shooting stars :P ) We could even see the Wallow fire that is currently destroying southern Arizona (it has currently burned 800 sq. miles...!!!)

We got to explore the mountain more while we there as well. Jenny and Eric and I did some easy hiking around. More telescopes that we saw were the 12m ARO (Arizona Radio Observatory) radio dish. (No cell phones on the mountain or they would interfere with the radio telescopes!)

The 12m ARO dish.

Jenny is so strong!

We tried to visit the 25m VLBA (Very Large Baseline Array), but it was closed.

Con, Jenny and I in front of the 25m VLBA dish.

We got to fiddle around with things at the WIYN .9m as well. This was pretty fun. Jenny had been observing there previously. It is a VERY hands-on observatory, much unlike big WIYN, which is the Ritz hotel compared to the Super 8 little WIYN. Apparently it is very 'character-building' scope- you pretty much have to do everything by hand: Fill the dewar (that houses the liquid nitrogen that cools the electronics), open the dome slit, move the dome, point the telescope at the lamp screen, and in Jenny's case once, tracking the dome!! Since objects in the sky are constantly moving (due of course to the Earth's rotation), in order to observe them, the telescope must 'track' them, or move at the same rate they do while pointing at them. Well, apparently when Jenny was there the dome wasn't tracking (the dome slit needs to move with telescope of course), and she had to sit in the dome all night moving it with a manual joystick-esque panel. Did I mention this was in January? :P So yes, a character-building telescope indeed!

Believe it or not, this photo is NOT posed! A teaching moment at the .9m, caught off the record. Eric, Jenny, and Con.

We also got to sit in the Cass focus of the 4m telescope!! The Cass(egrain) focus of a telescope is directly below the prime mirror, at the bottom of the telescope. I didn't take any photos, and can't find anything good on the internet. Suffice to say it was incredibly neat to be at the bottom of a huge telescope, sitting crouched underneath a 15 ton mirror looking at all the electronics and instruments that light from space gets fed into!

But in time our run was up, and it was time to head back to Tucson. On the way back to Tucson, we got stopped by border control. When they asked if everyone in the car was a US citizen, I was soooo tempted to say 'si' but refrained for fear of being jailed. We also saw a dust devil on the way!

A dust devil on our way to Tucson.

Con took us on detour through the Saguaro National Forest to check out the scenery and take a few short walks. WOW, are there are a lot of saguaros here! The mountains are covered in them. From afar you wonder if they are tree trunks, but upon approaching you realize they are really just thousands of CACTI. Maybe this is only so cool to me because I had never seen a cactus until arriving in Phoenix last year. Even so, there were none in Flagstaff since it was in the mountains, so being in the desert this year has been cactus-land for sure.

A dead saguaro.

We then stopped at a real nice Mexican restaurant in Tucson, where I tried mole (chocolate chili sauce) for the first time... it was... intriguing. Then we went to the airport where Jenny rented a car (she stayed with me from Monday til Friday) and then it was finally back to my apartment and getting used to a diurnal life again. The weather was great up on Kitt Peak, 70 during the day (windy and colder at night), but it was the BEST escape from Tucson. Here I am again though in the 100+ weather and cloudless skies. Home sweet home!