I had a bit of two worlds this evening… I headed out to Moorman’s boulders after work to do a bit of climbing before the sun went down. I was feeling pretty mellow today, so I didn’t push things too hard. Worked some problems that I’d been trying before, tried some new ones, and sent some “old friends”. I went with another graduate student at UVa (though not in the astro dept!), who showed me a couple other problems there that I hadn’t tried before.. Good times all around, and minimal pain to the fingers.
After bouldering, I finished up some lab grading I’d been working on during the afternoon. Still have another lab to grade as well as a midterm for a 100 level class. Should be a busy weekend.
I’ve just wrapped up my night’s effort to reduce the data taken at the Green Bank Telescope. I am using the GBTIDL software package to reduce the data. So far I’ve only been flagging bad data in the scans of our targets. Due to the low amount of radio frequency interference (RFI) in Green Bank, only ~1 minute of total data was severely affected in the several hours of data taken! Now that I’ve got the hang of flagging obviously bad data, the next step is to calibrate the spectra using the flux calibrators observed during the run. This involves a conversion of antenna temperature (T_A which measures the strength of the signal measured by the receiver) to an actual flux value with the gain and any atmospheric opacity taken into account…
But I think it’s time to call it a night. Have a full day of meetings, classes, and talks planned for tomorrow!
Yesterday was an exceptionally warm day. Pushing the mid-60s, it was definitely warm enough to go climbing. In fact, (as you can see) it was warm enough that climbing without shirts was more comfortable! We spent about 3 hours bouldering around outside Cville, at the local Moorman’s spot.
There were a fair number of other folks climbing there, some of whom I knew from the UVa Outing club. The picture is me working on a problem with a few big throws.. Didn’t finish it yet, but made some good progress on it…
As usual, things are rather busy here. Classes are in full swing, and I’m trying to get research done as well. I had an observing run last week using the NIR spectrograph built here at UVa. Sadly, it was pouring rain all night and we never opened the dome.
I’ve also been working with some data from the Spitzer Space Telescope to supplement some near-infrared data on an interesting Seyfert Galaxy. It’s an interesting project, so we’ll see what comes of it.
I finally went climbing with the UVa Outing club. We went bouldering just outside of town. It was a good time, and I’m looking forward to doing more stuff with them. I’ve put a few pictures online here: Moorman Bouldering on Flickr.
Several of the astro grads and myself went hiking a week and a half ago. We did Old Rag, which is a well known hike in the Shenandoah. We had a great time. Pictures are online here: Old Rag Hiking on Flickr
Anyways.. more soon hopefully..
The weather has warmed up quite a bit here in Charlottesville! It’s shaping up to be quite a nice summer.
I spent the morning bouldering just outside down. There’s only a couple boulders, but we managed to find some good spots to climb. Neither Rachael or Nicole had been bouldering before (although Nicole has been climbing with me a couple times). We had a lot of fun, and got some good climbing in. My callouses have all but disappeared from last year’s climbing season, so my hands are a bit raw, but that’s all part of the game!
I only took a couple pictures as I was usually busy spotting or coaching, but this shot shows Rachael and Nicole scrambling down off the boulder.
We also met a couple other people from Charlottesville. They’d just moved here from Montana, so were excited to see my Idaho license plate.
Rachael has posted more pictures: Bouldering on Flickr
One of the great things about RIT was the on-campus climbing gym. I spent many a night there climbing, training, and hanging out. Until last night, I hadn’t found anything similar in Charlottesville. There is a climbing gym, but it is supposedly very over priced and not very good. So I’ve been holding off on dumping money into that.
Last night I went to a bouldering area about 20 minutes outside of Cville. It was great! While there are only a few smallish boulders (nothing compared to the Niagara Glen), it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, not having bouldered since May, my fingers were quite weak and soft. I managed to slice two finger tips open on holds! My fingers are a bit sore today, which should make climbing tomorrow interesting. But it was great to get out!
