The Life Austin

I've been waiting to post about my trip to Austin, TX until I could upload pictures onto my computer, but I had been missing my computer-camera cord... It's a funny but uninteresting story where it went, but suffice to say it made a long trek from Austin to Oklahoma to Indiana and back to me a month later...

Anyway! I went to the AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting again this year (last year it was in Seattle). This time it was in Austin, which is awesome because it was 70 degrees in Texas in January. Woohoo! I flew in on a Saturday, though the conference didn't start until Sunday. I got to reunite with my buddies from my REU last summer. It was great to see them all again, and I got to see Jenny too, who is now in her first year of grad school at U. Colorado! The meeting kicked off Sunday with a huge opening reception at the Austin convention center. Imagine thousands of astronomers getting together to eat h'ordervs, drink alcohol, and talk about science... sheesh.

Monday-Thursday was spent waking up early to attend astronomy talks, splinter sessions, peruse the free shwag, talk to national institutions and universities about job positions (yeck), and talk to professors, students and others. Social overload! Oh, and I guess the whole reason I went to AAS was so that I could present a poster one day about my summer research :P (which went very well!)

Notable non-astronomy events are limited to great restaurants I ate at. One was Max's Wine Dive (slogan: Fried chicken and champagne... why the hell not?!). I had an outrageously delicious sandwich that had fried eggs, gruyere, lettuce, tomato, and truffle oil all between sourdough bread. No words can describe the magnificence of this sandwich.
Another great place Jenny and I ate at at least 3 times was the Cafe Crepe which had amazing sweet and savory crepes (mmm nutella).
Last, I had a great burger at Stack Burger Bar where I had a veggie burger with a fried egg (what's with Austin and putting fried eggs on all their sandwiches?), a parmesan crisp, tomato and lettuce... Yum! If you ever find yourself in Austin, be sure to try these places! :)

Oh, I forgot to mention the most important aspect of the trip: the hotel. NOAO put all their employees up in the Hilton. Ritzy lobbies, overpriced coffee, and complimentary door-openers were just some of the free benefits included in the several hundred dollar bill. The best part was the pool. It was on the roof of the ~10th floor and looked out to the skyline of Austin. Jenny and I went swimming at night, where the chilly 60 degree weather forced us into the hot tub (too much sarcasm?). Needless to say, we felt extremely empowered, and the situation could have only been improved if we had martinis and a smooth jazz band was playing under the bamboo tent.

Sunset1 from the hotel room window.

Sunset2 from the hotel room.

THE POOL.

After the meeting, I stayed around Friday-Sunday (as I did last year). I explored downtown Austin, attempted to go to the children's museum (which was utterly pitiful compared to Indy's, not to mention meant only for children under the age of 10), visited the Texas Capitol Building, and stopped in a few other landmarks. I stayed with a friend who used to work at IU and now attends UT-Austin for astronomy grad school. I had lots of fun exploring the university campus and area, sleeping in, and meeting some of the grad students there. I also went and saw an Austin Symphony concert with a friend I met during my trip to DC last year!

A neat building downtown. Not sure what it is for.

Pretty Catholic church!

Capitol building.

These trees were all over next to the capitol building. Anybody know what they are?

The glory of Texas, where everything is bigger.

Texas library & archives.

All in all, a great trip, and my first Texan adventure outside of their airports!

Playing Catchup

Instead of writing in detail, get ready for pictures in detail. OK, I know I went to Colorado ~4 months ago, but here you go. I went to visit my friend Eric (who was in my internship last summer) who was currently in Colorado for the summer. I flew to LA then to Denver (most illogical layover EVER, but I did get to see the sun set on the ocean!). I stayed with Eric for his last night in Boulder, CO before we started on our road trip back to Tucson (1000+ miles!). You may ask why I flew to CO, then drove back. We wanted to visit lots of landmarks and explore a bit, so driving was the way to go!

An abbreviated (if you can believe it) history of the trip. I'll skip all the details about getting lost trying to find campgrounds, camping in the middle of some national forest, meeting interesting/strange people we along the way, and all the shenanigans accomplished along the way. Let the photos commence!

Day 2:

The Flatirons of Boulder behind. Crazy Eric in front.

Way above Boulder! How many hikers can you spot??

The sunset on the way to Ward, CO and our campground.

 Day 3:

The drive to the Rockies early in the morning! Beautiful trees (just waiting to be burnt).

The view from Lake Isabelle in the Rockies! The snowmelt made for pristine (and FREEZING) water!

Lake Isabelle below during our short trip into the Rockies!

 What I looked like throughout most of the trip. The scenery was amazing!

Just one of the beautiful scenes on our trip through the Rockies!

Cool patterns on the mountains in CO.

Wait, what is that below the mountains?? THAT'S RIGHT. SAND DUNES.

The Great Sand Dunes in southwest CO. I honestly didn't even know these existed prior to the trip!

Standing on the top of a sand dune... with mountains behind? Nature is cool.

Day 3:

Cliff dwellings on Mesa Verde Park, southwest CO.

More cliff dwellings!

Eric the photographer! The view from Mesa Verde, CO.

Standing on 4 states at once! Four corners, USA.

On our way to Canyon de Chelly, AZ.

The drive in northeast AZ to Canyon de Chelly.

 Day 4:

Canyon de Chelly, AZ. Sheer cliffs!!! Native Americans still live in the canyon!

Don't worry Mom, I didn't fall.

Back in Tucson, AZ!

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.

Quote of The Day

cfaesi: just on the harvard site

  not astro people

  one business grad student and one education grad student

 me: hm

  can't trust those businessmen

 cfaesi: especially if they're Arabic!

  (just channeled my inner Eric)

 me: of course! arabic businessmen are by nature the most devious people

 cfaesi: and they should be profiled at every opportunity

 me: I'm glad we see this the same way

 cfaesi: yeah, this country is way too liberal

  cant believe we dont have a flat tax and that they allow immigration

 me: I know. This country is going to hell. First, gay marriage, now we raise the debt ceiling!?

 cfaesi: yeah that was such a pro gay move

 me: obviously. I think what this country needs is another president like G.W.Bush

 cfaesi: nah, too liberal

 me: this just made my day

cfaesi: really

  I'm starting to be physically disgusted with myself
-Conversation between myself and Chris

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!