There is an eerie silence in the Clay control room. It’s a bit like a spooky Twilight Zone episode where everyone has disappeared, but their disembodied voices periodically ring out.
Despite the remoteness of 2026A, it made sense for me to be here, as I will be spending the rest of the week at LCO meeting with colleagues to work on a new Magellan instrument called MagNIFIES. When it comes to Magellan in about 4 years, it will be the best infrared spectrograph in the world. How awesome to use one amazing instrument and plan another in the same week.
I arrived yesterday, hung out a bit with the MagAO-X remoters and visited Baade by moonlight to see the engineering in action (their control room was almost as crowded as when the MagAO-X team is here).
Speaking of the Moon, my flight was landing in Santiago just as the Moon was rising. The couple in the seats in front of me asked the flight attendant why it was such a strange color. The flight attendant turned out to be a keen observer of the sky from the plane, and clearly understood that the Moon could only be seen like that at certain times of month and that the orange was normal (but she didn’t mention Rayleigh scattering). In contrast, a few minutes later, the people behind me, apparently less keen observers of the sky, asked her, “What is that thing?” and had trouble believing it was the Moon.
A different color is definitely on my mind today, as it is May 1, i.e. “College Decision Day,” and that means that my youngest offspring decided whither he will fly from our nest. I helped my mom find yarn in “CWRU Blue” so she could make him an appropriate hat. Yes, there is a web app for finding yarn to match a given hex code.
However, unless it is allowed to be totally self-referential, that is not really a color associated with this blog post, so …
Color of the Day: Rising Moon Orange
Song of the Day: The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel