Aleya has put her pictures online from our recent trip to Seneca Rocks.
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Aleya’s view of the weekend at Seneca Rocks
I wrote a bit about the recent climbing at Seneca Rocks. As I noted, Aleya was on the trip and did an excellent job. Yesterday, she was a guest blogger on Rock Climber Girl’s website talking about the Seneca Rocks Trip, so check it out:
Rock Climber Girl: Guest Blogger Aleya: “Fear”.
Aleya writes posts on her own website as well: rockandsky.com. You can also follower her on twitter: Blueskeyes207.
Monday, 12 October 2009
A perfect fall day at Seneca Rocks
Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous fall day, and I spent it on the best ways possible: outside climbing. Aleya and I met up with Mike and Katie at Seneca Rocks on Saturday. The Friday night rain made for difficulty getting a fire going, but after a healthy dose of lighter fluid, we had coals at least. After a very nice sunset, the sky was mostly clear, with a bit of haze evident when looking at stars near the horizon.
Sunday dawned cool and sunny. At 8 we split up and went to climb our respective routes. Aleya and I started on “Skyline Traverse”, a classic route. We had climbed the first pitch together last time we were there, before rappelling off (I had climbed the whole thing a year or two before). We got there early enough to be the first ones on the route and climbed our way up. It was fun leading all the pitches. I was quite proud of Aleya, overcoming the psychological crux of the route (stepping off a bit comfy ledge onto a face ~100ft above the ground).
The 3rd pitch of Skyline brought us up to the lower end of Broadway ledge. A short walk down the ledge brought us to the base of “Up and Coming”. We climbed this without too much trouble, other than a spontaneous variation I added in the middle (which upped the “spicy” grade). This relatively easy climb brought us to the base of the Cockscomb where I (briefly) met up with Mike and Katie. After bringing Aleya up (we broke “Up and Coming” into two pitches), we followed Mike and Katie across the second pitch of “Old Ladies Route”.
That second pitch ends at a nice vertical crack, presenting us with a choice. We could either head up the crack (“Windy Corner”) or finish on the relatively easy third pitch of “Old Ladies”. Aleya opted to head up “Windy Corner”. It was an enjoyable climb, with the exception of pulling over a chockstone. I don’t particularly enjoy them, especially on lead. Other than that it was a fun pitch.
This brought us to the summit ledge where the 4 of us met up and went to the summit. It was absolutely gorgeous the whole day, and the summit was no different. Perfect temperature, and great views with the leaves changing color on the hills around us. While sitting at the belays I’d just gaze out over the hills and take in the beauty. Occasionally a falling leaf would get caught in a thermal and I would watch it spiral upwards.
We spent a half hour or so on the crowded summit before rappelling off on the West face of the South summit. To cap it all off we had pizza across the street and watched folks standing on the summit. Couldn’t have asked for a better Fall day…
Friday, 9 October 2009
Asking for telescope time
The past few weeks have been quite busy. There has not been much time to do actual research, but I have spent lots of time thinking about science. An array of proposals have been due over the past few weeks, from large radio telescopes (Westerbork, VLA) to large optical telescopes (Gemini) to small telescopes (Bok 90″ on Kitt Peak). About an hour ago I submitted the last proposal for a month or two. I have asked for a decent chunk of time to obtain optical and radio data to support my PhD thesis. I will hear back on some of the allocation requests next week or the week after, but some will take until December. I am anxious to find out, but I have plenty to keep me busy over the next few months.
My main order of business starting next week is to write papers. I have two or three research projects which are close to completion and need to written up for publication. So I will be setting aside any new work for the time being to tie up loose ends on these projects. More on those as they progress along…
This afternoon I continued my work on a Seyfert galaxy. Last week, while waiting for proposal comments from collaborators, I measured strengths of emission lines at various places in the galaxy. Using ratios between different elements or different transitions of a specific element, we can learn something about the physical conditions (temperature, density) of the gas! Quite cool. So today I continued working on the raw data, making plots of some interesting ratios. That will give us an opportunity to see if we see any changes in the physical conditions with location in the galaxy. The small plotting portion is done now and will wrap up my week. Off to the weekend! More on that after it has happened 
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Bike MS Ride Summary
26-27 Sept was the 2009 Bike MS event. I wrote briefly about this fundraiser in the past. Thank you to all who donated!
The morning got off to an interesting start, with cool weather and rain on the drive from Charlottesville to Buchanan (site of the race). However, the weather looked ok as we pulled into town. We did the final registration, then hopped on our bikes just in time of the final (delayed) start. There weren’t very many people riding, some having started during the previous wave, others completely bailing on the event (out of 80 who signed up, only 30 actually showed up).
Andre, Charles and I did a 50 mile loop, while the others did a 25 mile ride. I won’t go into the gory details, suffice to say it was cool weather (mid 50s) and rainy for most of the ride. That made for some interesting riding. We briefly got lost (due to my inability to read signs 
) which tacked on another 6 miles, but hey, what’s a charity ride without getting lost?
There were plenty of rest stops along the way with food and drink. The ride was quite well supported! I hadn’t done a 50 mile ride in at least a year, but I managed to make it through, probably due in large part to the frequent “refueling” points along the way.
Once we finished the ride, we were treated to a nice fried chicken dinner! Despite the rain and cold I had a great time. I’m definitely looking to go back next year to ride and support the MS Society.
Galaxies 09 Conference Wrap-Up
The 2009 ALMA Conference on “Assembly, Gas Content and Star Formation History of Galaxies” wrapped up 2 weeks ago after 4 days of talks and discussions. It was a very interesting conference with great talks and science. Most of the presentations will be posted online in the next week or two, so feel free to check them out.
I wanted to highlight a couple of the talks I found most interesting. Eventually these talks will be online, so you’ll be able to see them. Until then, my brief descriptions will hopefully suffice.
Implications and Applications of the Fundamental Manifold (reference) – Scaling relations within galaxy types have been known for a while (e.g., Tully-Fisher relation for spiral galaxies, fundamental plane for elliptical galaxies), and they are interesting because it seems that galaxies of a certain type generally follow the same trends in their physical properties (e.g., rotation velocity and intrinsic luminosity [mass]). This is encouraging because it suggests the physics governing galaxy assembly and evolution are similar between galaxies. The interesting aspect of this talk is that that a set of galaxy parameters have been found which allow one to place (almost) all galaxies on a single correlation. Most galaxy types follow the same trend, with low scatter, which means random processes don’t dominate the formation process of galaxies.
On the (Non)Evolution of HI Gas in Galaxies (“Swimming Pool Model of Galaxy Formation”; reference) – Looking at Ly-alpha observations out to the somewhat distant Universe (10 billion years ago), the speaker was able to learn about the amount of neutral hydrogen in galaxies as the Universe evolved. He found that there didn’t seem to be much change over 10 billion years, which might be somewhat surprising given galaxies have been forming stars throughout that time. His explanation was that galaxies have a set “pool” of atomic hydrogen. When the pool overflows (due to an accretion event), the extra atomic hydrogen turns into molecular hydrogen and can form stars. But the amount of atomic hydrogen in a galaxy stays roughly constant (i.e. – the pool is always full).
All-sky radio surveys with the WSRT – This talk focused on some new instrumentation being developed at ASTRON for use on their radio telescope (the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope). The coming focal plane array will allow a significantly increased field of view for the telescope, allowing them to survey the sky much faster than has previously been possible. They are proposing to do an all-sky survey for HI, OH, and radio continuum. This is quite exciting as a very little volume of the Universe has been looked at in neutral hydrogen, and that was done in small targeted observations. The future WSRT survey would aim to detect HI out to 4 billion light years! That would provide a wealth of new information on neutral hydrogen. It would be something like the SDSS for neutral hydrogen.
