I’ve been seeing these trees in full color on my drive to work for the last week or so. Kept meaning to get a picture of them but kept forgetting to bring my camera. Finally, this morning I got a picture of them. Fortunately, most of the leaves were still on the trees still, even after a bit of a blustery day we had yesterday.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
The Green Bank Telescope
About two and a half weeks ago, the radio astronomy class I’m taking went on a field trip to Green Bank, WV to visit the NRAO site there. The trip was planned for a maintenance day specifically so we would be able to go up on the world’s largest fully steerable telescope: the Green Bank Telescope.
We had a fantastic time, and were also able to tour the 43m equatorial radio telescope at the same site. I’ve finally gotten pictures uploaded from the trip. Here are a few, with a link below to the full set on flickr.
Full set of pictures: NRAO Green Bank on Flickr
Monday, 27 October 2008
18th Century Astronomer
… only sorta I guess.
But, I am without computer at home for the near future. On Thursday of last week I shipped my laptop back to HP for them to deal with a hard drive issue I’ve been having since the summer. The disk will shut off while I’m using the laptop, causing it to lock up (and sometimes lose data!). No biggie.. At least I have my desktop at home, right?
Wrong.
Friday afternoon, it seems my monitor no longer works. I assume the actual computer works fine, but without a monitor, what’s the point?
It is a bit of a change to be cut off from the internet like this (although not necessarily a bad one). I do miss my music, which is all stored on my computer. But, fortunately I still have my workstation here in the office (where I’m comfortably typing this).
I have been doing some fun/interesting things lately though. This past Friday was the Fan Mountain Public Night. Sadly, it was quite overcast (and a little rainy!), so we were unable to use the telescopes. A few people showed up, and we gave them tours of the telescopes and showed them the instruments used to carry out research here at UVa.
Saturday was a bit more relaxed of a day.. bit of walking in downtown Charlottesville, and watching the Penn St football game. Yesterday, I took my weekend visitors out to Green Bank, WV to visit the NRAO site. Aleya had discovered they were holding an open house, so we went to show her and her brother some stuff about radio astronomy. It was quite a cool experience, marking my second time to Green Bank in a little over two weeks (pictures coming as soon as I have a working monitor 
). Yesterday’s trip had a cool highlight.. standing under the Green Bank Telescope as it slewed to a new astronomical target. It was quite impressive to see the world’s largest fully steerable telescope moving.
The visit to NRAO was capped off with the raffle, where Aleya’s brother won a 6″ Dobsonian Reflector telescope!
Now that it’s back to work, I’ve spent quite a few of the last 24 hours grading tests for an introductory astronomy course. I’m 2/3 through, and should be done later this evening. Can’t wait!
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
Interesting Sleep Cycle
The sleep cycle for the last 24 hours has been a bit interesting. I went to bed last night at 9pm. Slept until 1:30am, then got up and went into work to do a half-night of remote observing on the APO 3.5m telescope. We had very nice weather, although quite a lot of variety in “seeing”. In the 4 hours alotted, my advisor and I observed several high-redshift quasars and some Seyfert Galaxies. We wrapped up our observing program at about 8am Charlottesville time. The Apollo Lunar Ranging Progam was set to go next, so they had the last hour of the night.
Ordinarily, we would take calibration data following the end of our run, but since there was another observing program at the end, we had to wait until after they had finished to do wavelength and illumination calibration for the spectrograph. We could have done it before their program, but we would have lost ~45 minutes of observing time, so instead we waited until morning.
Taking calibration data wrapped up around 9:30am, after which I proceeded directly to my office and went to sleep on the sofa. My officemates began to filter in for the next hour or so, occasionally commenting on the “body on the sofa”. I finally roused myself just before 11am and went to work. Fortunately, my day today was fairly light, with a “Compact Objects” discussion session (“Compact Objects” refers to things such as X-ray binaries, neutron stars, black holes, and the like) and the High Energy Astrophysics class.
I headed home at 6, having consumed near 2L of Mountain Dew since 5am in my efforts to stay awake. Figuring it would be futile to attempt to work, I got into bed around 7, and slept for an hour and a half.
Quite an interesting sleep cycle eh? ~6 hours in 3 blocks. 
