In case you missed it yesterday, a picture of mine from the Solar Dynamics Observatory launch was the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD):
APOD: 2010 February 23 – Exceptional Rocket Waves Destroy Sun Dog
It was very cool to see the picture on APOD. I got a decent amount of feedback and contact from people. Lots of it on twitter but also a few emails. There was also a healthy discussion of the cause of the shockwaves on the APOD discussion board.
I just got back inside from watching the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) overhead as it orbited the Earth. It passed over Charlottesville and was visible from the reflection of the Sun’s light off the satellite. I was able to watch HST as it moved across the Southern sky.
As a nice coincidence for the evening it was followed a few minutes later by an Iridium Flare. Sadly, incoming clouds made it difficult to see, although I think I caught it as it was fading…
I found out about of these events via tweets from the @overcville account. The service is provided by orbiting-frog.com which has twitter accounts for a variety of locations. If you’re on twitter, should should check it out. And if there isn’t one for your location, you can request one. It is handy for notifying you of upcoming
For a more complete list, heavens-above.com will show you passes of more objects (satellites, comets, spacecraft, etc.) based on your location with charts showing their location in the sky. The only downside is that you have to remember to check it 
This week I was fortunate enough to witness two launches: the space shuttle for STS-130, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory. I’ve already posted some pictures from STS-130 (linked above).
As with STS-130, the SDO launch was scrubbed on the first day. After going through the whole 1 hour launch window on 10 February, the winds were consistently too high (above 20 knots). We thought we were going to be able to launch at the very end of the window and even came out of the hold at T-4 min. Sadly, winds went above the limit after just 1 second! So, it was scrubbed for 24 hours.
We tried again today. The launch window was from 10:23 – 11:23 and the winds were looking better today. There was a slight worry about clouds, but they didn’t prove to be an issue.
After yesterday’s scrub we were all anxious to see the rocket launch today. The weather is forecast to be bad tomorrow (rain, rain, rain) so Saturday would have been the next chance. During the scheduled hold at T-4 minutes, we heard that the weather was go and they were aiming for launch at the beginning of the window!
At 10:19, the countdown resumed to much cheering an excitement. Aleya was jumping around in anticipation as the clock ticked down. With 10 seconds remaining, the crowd helped things along: “9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1.. 0!”
The Atlas V was launched without booster rockets so the initial acceleration was slow. It seemed to take an agonizingly long time for the rocket to move… Finally, (it seemed!) the rocket was well on it’s way.
As the rocket picked up speed we followed it skyward. It continued climbing upwards, heading for a cloud and a sun dog. We were then treated to an amazing sight: the shockwave from the rocket’s supersonic travel rippled outwards through the cloud, destroying the sun dog:
Video of the event was captured by Anna Herbst, and hosted on spaceweather.com (.mov movie file). Very cool, I highly recommend watching it.
After blowing through the cloud, the rocket began creating a visible contrail behind it, snaking skyward.
We kept watching until we lost view of the rocket, well on its way to orbit.
I had a fantastic weekend as part of the group of twitter correspondents selected to cover the launch and associated events. It was an excellent group of people and we had a great time witnessing the launch of a much anticipated satellite. For some basic info on the goals of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, see the SDO website or this nice summary by Nicole, the Noisy Astronomer.
Part of my ongoing research has been to observe hydrogen gas (HI) in a number of Luminous Infrared Galaxies to study the dynamics of mergers and to look for evidence of galaxy mergers in systems which appear to be single galaxies in the optical. Some of the new data was featured on the ASTRON/JIVE Daily Image this past Friday. Click the link below to see two of the galaxies and a short description of the project..
The past few weeks have been fairly busy for me. I am starting to experience the seemingly never-ending cycle of proposing for telescope time. It started with the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope where proposals were due 15 January. After finishing that, internal requests were due for UVa telescopes. Coming up next is the deadline for NRAO telescopes, such as the Expanded Very Large Array. Fortunately, I don’t have to write any of the proposals from scratch, so that makes things a bit easier.
All of the requests are for data will be used for my PhD thesis, which will be investigating the gas and dynamics of merging pairs of (formerly) spiral galaxies as they transform into elliptical galaxies.
Writing proposals is interesting.. You have to succinctly (usually in 2-3 pages) describe the scientific merit of your project, complete with background and a technical justification showing it is feasible with the telescope. Often, the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) is composed of both experts and non-experts in your sub-field. So, you need to write a proposal which is scientifically accurate and compelling, but write it in such a way that someone on the TAC who is not an expert can still understand the project. It is sometimes a tough balance, especially when given just a few pages..
So, with two proposals down and one to go, I’d better get back to writing!
Certainly 2009 is beginning to wind down. In a week I will be heading to Idaho for Christmas. But, there’s lots to do before then!
The most pressing is certainly grading the last few labs for the 100-level Intro to Observing class. Final grades are due soon so I have 30 or so labs left to grade. 10 or so are the “Navigation by the Sun” lab, in which students use a sextant to determine the latitude and longitude of the lab area. If done carefully, it is possible to determine the position of the lab area to within a nautical mile. Generally though, the accuracy is such that students can only say they’re somewhere in the state of Virginia. Still though, not many people can say they’ve ever used a sextant!
Right after the New Year is the American Astronomical Society winter meeting in Washington, DC. I will be presenting a poster based on my MS thesis. Of course, the poster still needs to be made!
The last task that needs to be accomplished is the assignment of TA duties for the Spring semester. Fortunately, this doesn’t need to be done until the beginning of January. But given the complexity of dividing up the lab duties in an appropriate manner between ~10 TAs, it takes a bit of time (and iteration!).
So, that’s the list of glamorous things in the life of a grad student at the end of the semester.
I’ve been quite a few places on the last couple days.. Friday in Charlottesville, Saturday in Washington, DC, Sunday in Charlottesville and (digitally) San Fransisco.
The SF event was quite interesting.. the 2009 Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union begins tomorrow. Various people from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (including Aleya) are at the conference. An “Ask a Scientist” table was hosted by SDO as part of the pre-meeting events. So, for 4 hours I monitored the Exploration Station twitter feed where people could ask questions. I answered the questions, posting them under the NASA_SDO username. It was fun to answer science questions for people. They ranged from “How old is the Sun?” to “Who was the best scientist?” I was scrambling on occasion when I’d get multiple questions within a minute or two (especially ones that required a bit of research!). I had a great time with it though.
My week long visit to ASTRON is coming to a close. I am spending the rest of today wrapping some work up on a paper. It isn’t quite finished yet, but certainly closer and will be manageable to finish soon.
Additionally, I had observations of two sources using the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope during the middle of the week. It is always exciting to get new data and this data certainly didn’t disappoint! It looks like we have detected the neutral gas in two luminous infrared galaxies. It will be interesting to compare that to the abundance of other data available on these objects.. More on that later though.. once I have done a proper data reduction.
Tonight is the only night since I’ve been in the Netherlands which could remotely qualify as “clear”. But, since it’s all relative I can tell you how “clear” it was. As I was letting my camera go for a few minute exposure, I noticed a plane flying close in projection to the moon. I was initially hoping to see the plane silhouetted against the moon, but as it flew closer I realized that wasn’t going to happy, but something possibly even a bit more neat was going to…
As the plane flew “past” the moon, it was still close enough that it’s shadow was projected onto the thin cirrus which was abundant in the sky. So, based on that I can say with some confidence that the altitude of the clouds is greater than 0m and less than about 9000m! 
But, to the real point.. I was able to get a few pictures of the Dwingeloo 25m radio telescope. Despite the moon and haze, there are a few star trails evident. Taking even a 5 minute exposure (with the aperture open) was too long! It might have been fun to stop the aperture down and take some 30 minute exposures, but with the cool air (-4C!) my battery wasn’t lasting.
And finally, a picture of the heath by night..
Contrary to what the time on the blog post says, it’s 9:30am where I am. A few hours ago, I landed in Leiden for a week-long workshop on powerful radio galaxies. It’s going to be an exciting and interesting conference, but I must admit that I just really want to sleep right now. I managed to get ~5 hours of sleep on the plane, but as anyone who’s slept on a plane knows, it’s not “real” sleep.
And speaking of planes, I took a train from Amsterdam to Leiden and concluded (not for the first time and probably not for the last time), that trains are a much more civilized way to travel. It’s nice to go somewhere and not be shoe-horned in with 300 other people. But, trains aren’t as fast and in the US, they’re never on time. So I guess the price of losing civility is gaining time at your destination (if you even get there at all on Amtrak!).
But before I ramble too much, I’m going to go for a run and start the day by exploring town. My hope as the week goes on is to post some things about the conference here, but most likely, all I’ll have time to do is tweet on occasion. If you’re interested in the program it is available here: Program Powerful Radio Galaxies: Triggering and Feedback.
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