Author: Alycia Weinberger

It’s great to be back at LCO after a 15 month drought from observing here. That’s the longest I’ve gone without being here since 2009! All the same great people are still here, and it’s a pleasure to be back working with the staff and MagAO team. If you’re wondering about the title of the post, it’s from a new sign in the Clay Telescope kitchen that seems to have to do with making sure not to steal the dishes. Maybe it reads less like an edict from a communist authoritarian government in Spanish (“Colaboremos con el orden y trabajo”).

Tonight started with a unimpressive, as in barely noticeable, penumbral Lunar eclipse, but a nevertheless beautiful Moon-rise. The Moon is an astronomical object that my little thermal IR camera can detect for sure. On the other hand, Jared and I are considering writing our own FLIR control software for observing alpha Cen.

This afternoon I did Google Hangouts with both of my sons’ science classes. I think there was only one question asked by both sets of kids, and it was how much it cost to build Magellan. The best question I got was, “What is the most surprising thing you’ve ever found at the telescope?” I love the question, but I didn’t have the heart to explain how many hours of data reduction go into discoveries after leaving the telescope. Unfortunately, the slow internet connection we’ve had here meant they didn’t get to fully appreciate the video show that Mauricio put on as he slewed the telescope for them.

Speaking of Mauricio, here’s a cool (pun intended) picture of him washing the Clay primary with CO2 yesterday, in the IR, of course.

I saw two vizcachas at the ASB this afternoon and four vizcachas out behind the telescope tonight. You want to see IR photos of a vizcacha, you say? Why, of course you do.

The internet is not letting me post pictures or YouTube videos. So here are some lyrics for Rock Lobster by the B-52s:
Here comes a stingray
There goes a manta-ray
In walked a jelly fish
There goes a dog-fish
Chased by a cat-fish
In flew a sea robin
Watch out for that piranha
There goes a narwhal
Here comes a bikini whale!

Oooh, wait, some bits are getting through finally…

My family knows that if they want to plan something for me months in advance of when the next semester’s telescope schedule is released, they should consult a Moon phase calendar and choose a time near New Moon. You, dear readers, undoubtedly know that astronomy and not astrology dictated my schedule — infrared astronomers are usually found on telescopes during “light time,” i.e., when the Moon is up more than half the night. Light time is generally considered less valuable, because you can make observations at any wavelength when the sky is dark, but you can’t do visible light imaging of very faint objects when the sky is bright. That’s why the time before infrared astronomy is known as the dark ages (just kidding).

I was just out walking under the nearly full Moon, which drowned the Milky Way, glinted off the reflective Magellan domes, and cast my shadow upon a lit ground. So, of course, I was contemplating whether the history of science would be different if we had no Moon or two moons. What if we hadn’t had the monthly circuit of the Moon to teach us orbital dynamics and the laws of gravity and the geometry of our Solar System? Or what if we had multiple Moons that kept the sky bright all month and prevented us from observing deep space? Why, then we really would have been in the light-time dark-ages until the advent of infrared astronomy! Perhaps even worse, what if Jupiter hadn’t had bright moons that Galileo could see orbiting? How much longer would it have taken to arrive at a theory of gravity and an accurate picture of our place in the Universe?

I confess I’m being an overly smug infrared astronomer here. Tomorrow the Moon will be near a target I want to observe, and though our infrared camera won’t care, the wavefront sensor works in the visible and we’ll have to see just how flooded with photons it is. That could really make me a lunatic. See how the Moon drowns the all sky camera:

On a separate topic, both Magellans and the duPont telescope are being run by female astronomers tonight! I will here put in a shameless plug for our other blog, Las Campanas Belles. If you don’t speak Spanish and/or don’t know about the ringing rocks, you at least have to check it out to find out why we call it that. Here are some of our observers:

With all this talk of the Moon and ladies, tonight’s song has to be “I wished on the Moon” by the Billie Holiday, the lady who sings the blues. Tonight, we’re not singing the blues because it’s a great night. Paradoxically perhaps, listening to Billie Holiday makes me happy.

If you really must listen to any other version (Jared), you can listen to this one, but only Billie Holiday will do for my wishes on the Moon. And I refuse to look for a parody of it.

For the third day in a row, the internet connection is spotty to nonexistent. I was thinking  about the early 90s, when I was a graduate student, and my advisor, Gerry Neugebauer, was the director of Palomar Observatory. He wasn’t keen on getting internet to the dome because, as I recall, he thought astronomers would waste time on their email and pay
insufficient attention to their observing and that they would come to the mountain unprepared. I think both things do happen, but that generally the benefits of connectivity are enormously high. How else could we blog?
Seriously, though, while we could come prepared with any object we might possibly want to observe, instead we can find the coordinates of objects and their finding charts when we want/need them. While we could come prepared with a library of papers on all those targets, instead we can download them when we need them. When technical difficulties arise, it’s essential to contact the experts who aren’t on the mountain. And  being all the way in Chile is made much nicer by being able to call home easily with VOIP.

As if the internet weren’t already crisis enough, we’ve had technical difficulties with the AO stages last night and tonight (see last night’s blog post and my above comment about contacting experts who aren’t on the mountain and who are, in this case, in Italy).

You might we wondering, am I telling you absolutely everything?

Well not exactly. If that weren’t two crises enough, Katie and Jared are almost out of their Starbucks instant coffee. Panic could ensue before they’re resupplied (see 39 seconds in):

You can tell that’s an old movie because of all the leg room the passengers had. American Airlines executives today would be incredulous at how they could fly such empty planes;  it’d be like the incredulity young astronomers show about how we could live without internet at the telescope.

On a happy note, the wind is low, and the clouds have moved off just north of us:

Since the winds are in our favor, I would post some wind music  from Wind (I don’t think it’s ever been covered), but we don’t have internet access to YouTube tonight. Or email. But we are doing infrared astronomy and weirdly the connections to astronomical databases are working.  Gerry, here’s a toast to your memory.

Edit: I’m back to post the “Wind song” from Wind:

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