As we enter the final month of the year, I would like to share my Astronomy: Wrapped with you all.
You deployed six monitors with one viscacha background!
It takes real vizzion to do something like that.
This year you experienced five Empanada Sundays!
(That means up to 20 empanadas, at maximum order size!)
You hung out with Dr. Alycia Weinberger on three occasions!
(That’s once more than people who just went on the observing runs!)
You commited to git on the magao-x/MagAOX repository 137 times!
(Jared’s at 261 commits for the year, but don’t let that discourage you!)
And we still have seven nights to go.
Today marked the departure of Laird* and arrival of Alycia. Alycia is our local debris disk enthusiast, so it was good for her to meet Miles Lucas (our local polarimetry enthusiast).
*Attempted departure. The Holiday Inn club will be graced by his presence for a night, apparently.
For those of you following along at home, polarimetry and debris disks are best friends. It’s sort of like putting your polarized sunglasses on to cut through haze, only in reverse (to see all the dust).
The second half of the night was Eden’s to look at the beta Pictoris system again in hopes of getting it to reveal its secrets. We have a saying in this field: “It’s never a planet.” However, this is one of the rare exceptions. It’s actually pretty easy to find beta Pictoris b, especially if you already know it’s there.
Of course, as Katie put it, this wouldn’t be interesting unless we were seeing some things nobody had seen before. Time to analyze some data!
Song of the Day
This guy sounds like a didgeridoo, which is really something.
“Peace Somehow” by Avi Kaplan
Fun Fact of the Day
A lot of the Spanish words beginning in “a” (or especially “al”) are Arabic in origin:
