Author: Jared Males

We might make it. Alycia has one night left, and our next and last observer arrived today (get ready for something different — more to come).

The winds were finally a bit calmer tonight, and seeing was bouncing off 0.5″ for a while — but we still ended up with some clouds after midnight. Nothing too bad, but still a little frustrating.

Two days ago we had a song about a miracle. Here’s another one of sorts — though Johnny would disagree.

I saw the CDB live at the South Dakota State Fair. This was the encore, during Johnny’s solo the old man thrashed on a golden fiddle for 20 minutes.

Except when corrupt databases and/or fiber communication problems force us to do a hard reboot of the whole system, and there’s not enough time before sunrise to make it worth bringing it all back up again. Then we stop, even with stars in our eyes.

In keeping with tonight’s outrageous claims on astro-ph, we observed an Earth-sized object around a very nearby star. See Skemer and Close, 2011 for more info.

Since Katie just went with “not US-based” as her connection last night, I’ll just go with “Foreigner” and one of the all time classics.

If I could play guitar, I’d be in a rock band (I forgot to mention that I’ve seen Danzig live — front row right on the rail the whole show. He gave my best friend a high five.) If I could hit a curve ball I’d be chasing my cup of coffee still. The Navy wouldn’t promise me enough sea time on a fast attack, too many boring options. So I’m an astronomer now I guess. Still not sure what I’ll be when I grow up, but there’s still that one guitar.

I’ve been here for more than 3 weeks. 2 more to go.

This time we have actual Danzig, singing to the various mothers.

We seem to have more problems on *our* nights than on any others. I guess that’s a great customer service policy, but we’re really in this to do our own science. So, the X stage is dead (again) and it says “Morzinski” on the schedule. We spent the first half of the night fairly desperately trying to get the motor to move to just the right spot so that we could take our observations. The problem is the optical encoder (we think — if you’re keeping track that’s about the 11th explanation we’ve come up with). This means the motor doesn’t know where it is, so I spent 3 hours out on the platform pressing “go” and the “stop” as fast as I could to try to get it to hop to the right spot.

It finally landed exactly where we want it, and it is now turned off never to be turned on again. Or at least until we can safely troubleshoot it. For now, we are in a scientifically productive state and we’re leaving it there.

Here’s some more Amazing Grace.

Sigh. And also, our X stage started doing that thing again tonight. Laird, we may have to have one of our wonderful cable routing bonding sessions. You know, the kind where I hold the flashlight for 5 hours while you talk to yourself with your head inside the instrument. I can’t wait.

Since we had clouds, I bailed on the control room and went down to the astronomer’s lounge. Much comfy.

Here’s another Clint Black song. It also describes TJ’s last couple of nights.