Author: Logan Pearce

My household grew by one yesterday!  Meet Star:

She’s a baby African Pygmy Hedgehog. She was born on Feb 20th, 2020, and is still so so tiny! I got her from a local breeder, Tucson Hedgehogs, who take extraordinary care of their babies, training them and adapting them to being held, and make sure they are going to a good home by inspecting habitats before approving adoptions. The whole operation was professional and made me feel confident adopting a hedgehog from them.

Here’s the habitat I made for her out of a $10 kiddie pool:

Hedgehogs run like crazy at night, so the big pool was a good option to give her lots of room to run. The running wheel was popular last night. Hedgehogs are prey animals, so the thing they most want to do is burrow and hide, which she has plenty of opportunities for here. This morning I found her under the blue snuggle sack (not inside?). That’s why they love toilet paper rolls too, they stick their little heads inside and push them around and run around with them. I’ll try to get y’all a video or something when she does it, it’s pretty great. There is also a thermometer and heat lamp. Hedgehogs try to hibernate if it gets too cold, and that can be bad for their health, so hedgie owners have to be sure their environment is kept warm enough.

Here’s some more hedgehog facts. They are insectivores, and they’re actually immune to scorpion venom! They’re nocturnal, but they can be adapted to operate somewhat during the daytime, and can also be trained to use cat litter! But otherwise they’re not very smart, so that’s about all the training we can expect really. They’re also nearly blind, but their hearing and smell are top notch. They do this strange behavior that animal behaviorists aren’t quite sure why, called self-anointing. When a hedgie smells or tastes something new and exciting, they froth up and lick their spit all over their quills. It’s funny and kinda gross.

The popular pets in America are the African pygmy variety, which are related to but very different from their European cousins. African pygmy hedgies actually don’t exist in the wild, they’re only kept as pets!

Here’s some more Star glamour shots.

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Lastly, if you’ve been to my house or known me for a few minutes, you might know I have a bit of a thing for hedgehogs. So I wanted to finish off with a snapshot of the other hedgehogs in my house…

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That’s not close to all of them. People give me hedgehog things all the time, and I do nothing to discourage this behavior. In my former life as a middle school teacher, my students learned of my hedgehog habit and the gifts started rolling in. It was magical. (Pro tip: if you ever need to entertain ~30 twelve year olds for about 5 minutes while you wait for the bell to ring, I can wholeheartedly recommend hedgehog videos on YouTube. Also OK Go videos.)

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In honor of how cute Star is, song of the day is Cute Explosion by MrWeebl:

Hello again! Seems like my first blog post was way more than 9 days ago, but that’s the way of things now. March was a hell of a year and April is shaping up much the same. Most days start with a thought like “Wait, is it Tuesday?”. But as I said last time, in the big picture things could be much worse. It’s a matter of one foot in front of the other. Get through this deployment (as Jared said in his jargon-filled Navy retrospective, the current moment feels much like a deployment, only with more sun, less cleaning stations, and more existential dread. I’m finding myself in the same mindset as I had for deployments, and it’s quite helpful.). An interesting trend I’ve noticed in myself trying to do this while class thing is that my motivation level as a function of day of the week seems to be on a linearly descending prior probability distribution. And my productivity posterior distribution is the same shape as the prior. Illustrated by this plot:

But today I wanted to tell you all about Astronomy on Tap (@astronomyontap)! Astronomy on Tap is a collection of local satellite venues that host public astronomy talks, trivia, and games in bars around the world. As of this writing there are 77 different AoT venues past and present, from Chile to Germany to New York to Tucson. When I lived in Austin I was very involved with Astronomy on Tap Austin (AoTATX, @AoTATX), who hosts a huge event at the North Door on the third Tuesday of every month. Austin’s show is one of the biggest, with ~300 people attending every month! It was so much fun, and the other organizers are some of my dear friends.

So when I moved to Tucson, you better believe I jumped right into our local event, which we call Space Drafts (@Space_Drafts)!

Space Drafts takes over Borderlands Brewing on a Wednesday every month, with a couple of public talks by professional astronomers drawn from Steward Observatory, the Lunar Planetary Laboratory, NSF’s OIR Lab, or any of the other space-related institutions nearby (Tucson is such a space town!). It’s an all-levels show – you don’t have to know anything about space or science to enjoy it – and an all ages show, kids and dogs are encouraged to attend. Space Drafts is organized by me, Ryan Boyden of Steward, Cassandra Lejoly of LPL, and Stacey Alberts of Steward. (If you’re local please consider supporting Borderlands during this time!)

But that was in the before times. Our March show was canceled, and we’ve canceled all future shows for the time being. All looked dire for Astronomy on Tap until the intrepid folks at AoTATX figured out how to live stream their monthly show via YouTube and zoom, and it was off to the races (see their first live streamed event here). Which led to what happened yesterday………

Yesterday was Astronomy on Tap’s 7 year orbit-versary. 7 years since the first show(s) began accreting to form the complex system we have today. To celebrate, satellites from around the world came together to put on a 7 HOUR LIVE STREAMED AoT EVENT. For 7 hours, astronomers all over the world took over to give talks on everything astronomy. There were even live games, and the winners are getting prizes mailed to them! It was an EPIC event organized in literally like 3 weeks. They came up with idea ~3 weeks ago. And it all worked!

The event was broken into three 2-hour blocks. The first block (occurring at 12:30pm Tucson time) was hosted by European satellites and featured speakers from Europe. The second was the Eastern US and Canada, and the last block was the Western US, including yours truly. It was organized by Rebecca Larson of AoTATX (@SaturnsWings) and Cameron Hummels of AoT Los Angeles (@astrochum), and they did an AMAZING job. It was so much work and they really pulled it together to put on a fantastic show. I (represening Space Drafts) worked behind the scenes to manage YouTube comments, post social media links and highlights, and wrangle questions from the audience to feed to the hosts and speakers.

The end of the Western block featured “rapid fire” talks, short 2 min answers to frequently asked questions. Yours truly gave an answer to the question “What is SETI up to these days?”, based on my UG internship I did at Berkeley SETI Research Center.

At the end, Bobak Ferdowsi played “Name the Moon”. You might recognize Bobak as “Mohawk Guy” from the Curiosity landing. The YouTube chat was all abuzz at his appearance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobak_Ferdowsi

You can see the WHOLE 7 hour event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWuQq3ljCpc. (embedding is disabled for this video). Our block starts at timepoint 4:35:00. The whole thing is SUPER great, but I definitely recommend watching the first talk by Andy Howell (@d_a_howell, @ScienceVsCinema, @AoTSB), of AoT Santa Barbara on the science of the movie Arrival, and Jessie Christiansen’s (@aussiastronomer ) drinking game of “Will you survive on this exoplanet” at time point 5:04:00 (spoiler: no). (You can play your own drinking game of Exoplanet Roulette alone in your house here: http://web.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/christia/index.html#roulette). Also check out time point 6:17:00 for no reason at all I don’t know why just check it out….

It was an AMAZING achievement with LOTS of people working hard behind the scenes to pull it off. It was so much fun, a nice chance to do AoT with my ATX friends again, and keep AoT alive in this isolation period.

I’m going to look into doing virtual Space Drafts, and you can also watch AoTATX’s regular monthly show on their youtube channel on the third Tuesday of every month. If you’re not in Tucson, there is likely a local show near where ever you live! Go to https://astronomyontap.org/locations/ to find out, and come out and support the live shows when they get rolling again. And support the local venues, which you can also find here, now!!

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Today’s song of the day is by musician, Mars exploration microphone scientist, and frequent AoTATX contributor Jason Achilles Mezilis (https://jasonachilles.com/). He is the last “rapid fire” speaker of last night’s show. And I picked this song because I miss Texas.

Greetings blog world. You haven’t heard from me yet, because this is my first post here on the XWCL blog! First let me introduce myself. I joined the group last fall as a new 1st year graduate student at Steward Observatory at Univ of Arizona in Tucson. I came from the glorious University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with a group there studying directly-imaged low mass companions to young stars with the Keck telescope. So joining the MagAO-X team was a no-brainer. I plan to continue to study how stars and planets form with MagAO-X and MagAO-classic for my PhD work. You can see my science at my website www.loganpearcescience.com

Outside of science, I chose to come to Arizona because I knew I would love living in Tucson. I am a non-traditional student, I am returning to school following a career as a public school science teacher, and another as an officer in the US Navy (our illustrious leader and I have that in common). So in addition to the great food scene, numerous parks (national and otherwise) to explore, and craft beer scene, Tucson was appealing because I could afford to buy a house and live a more “adult” life than is stereotypical for a grad student.

And well things currently being what they are, I’m getting to spend a lot of quality time with the new house these days. As Jared said yesterday, we’ve officially begun a stay-at-home order in Arizona as of last night, but I’ve been effectively quarantined, working from home and only going out for groceries and exercise, for 18 days as of today. So I thought I’d share a bit of what being a grad student looks like, at least for me, right now.

First of all, I want to acknowledge my incredibly privileged position. I have a steady job with guaranteed income for at least two more years (I’m on a fellowship), I have stable housing and am in no danger of not being able to pay my mortgage, and I don’t have to put myself at risk of exposure to COVID-19 as part of my job like healthcare professionals, janitorial staff, and grocery store workers do. I am incredibly grateful to have these privileges, and am glad to do my part to help keep everyone safe by essentially doing nothing. It gets tedious and sometimes I get sad, but it helps me to remember that my staying home is an essential part of keeping everyone safe, and to remind myself how much worse some folks have it, and how incredibly brave our front line actors are in these strange times.

What’s more, transitioning to working from home was pretty easy for me. I don’t really work in the lab on campus, my science is basically entirely done from my laptop. And switching to classes via zoom was pretty smooth as well. It took some adjustment, but things are basically proceeding as before, only minus the social interaction and with the addition of existential dread.

When I first arrived at Steward Observatory in August, I had to move into a temporary office for 8 weeks while they did maintenance in my wing. Then I was able to move into my actual office for a few months and get settled in. Now, I’m in a brand new office, otherwise known as my dining room. Here, let me give you a brief tour:

Zoom has been huge, also Slack and WhatsApp, for keeping some semblance of social interaction. I will be joining a zoom game night with other grad students tonight.

So, in summary, while no one has any idea what the world will look like in a few months, technology has enabled me to keep going more or less as before, with the exception of no MagAO-X run to look forward to next month, and missing vital social interaction. I won’t claim that it hasn’t been hard, but I’m well aware of how much worse it could be. If you’re struggling with uncertainty in these times, with your mental well being from isolation, with being productive with your children at home, or with fear of exposure to the virus from your job, please know that I’m thinking of you, I’m wishing you the best, I’m hoping you are able to stay safe and well. And we’ll get through this together, while we’re apart.

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My song(s) of the day comes from something helping me stay sane in these times, as well as be productive on my newfound cross-stitching habit: Star Trek. Star Trek has practically raised me from an early age (and probably was a non-trivial factor in my decision to join the Navy…), and it has some of the most iconic classic theme songs ever made. Much as Jared studied iterations of Jolene yesterday, I would like to offer my reflections on a Star Trek theme. I’ll go chronologically.

Of course everyone knows the classic original. It’s identifiable almost from the very first note:

Plus that classic monologue. I’ve never loved the original series much (despite trying to forgive it as a product of its time, I just can’t stand the misogyny), but you can’t deny the impact on culture.

Next of course is the show that defined my childhood, and the one I’m currently cross-stitching to, Star Trek: The Next Generation. A theme every bit as iconic, dare I say more-so, than the original:

I mean come on. Who won’t be stirred by that? Plus look at all the exoplanet love.

And now we come to the most important entry. The absolute pinnacle of everything Star Trek. A show ahead of its time, that pioneered the story arc and paved the way for the golden age of television we’re living in now*. A show from the 90’s that is every bit as good as it ever was to modern watchers. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It’s not your parent’s Star Trek. It’s dark, actions have consequences (unlike the very episodic TNG). Every character, even the side characters, are deep, rich, and have long character arcs that grow and change over the run of the show. Some of the most compelling characters, like Nog or Damar, start out as throw aways or comic relief, and end up with some of the most powerful transformations. And Major Kira was definitely an early feminist icon for me. And Captain Sisko had moral grey areas unlike Picard. I could write a thesis on this show. I watched it as a kid, and now I’ve watched it all the way through twice as an adult. Proud to report, it holds up.

The theme itself is pretty standard fair for a Star Trek show, nothing too unique to say about it. The song is lovely and the imagery serves as nice establishing shots for the show.

*(no joke – it was one of the first shows of the 90s to incorporate the story arc, and was criticized at the time, and made the networks really nervous. But because of it they were able to tell richer stories and characters than TNG or Voyager. Look it up!)

Next we come to Star Trek: Voyager. It’s a fine intro I guess.

Voyager is trash. I said what I said.

Next up is the most controversial entry in the bunch: Star Trek: Enterprise. Whoa boy did this theme get the fandom’s panties all in a bunch. First of all, it has lyrics. And, *dumb* lyrics at that. Then the imagery behind the song was such a huge departure from tradition, some folks lost their minds. Enterprise is widely regarded as the black sheep of the Star Trek family, and honestly this theme song is a big part of it.

Hot take: I actually rather like Enterprise. I even kinda like this silly theme song. Yes, it’s quite cheesy. But I find it charming anyway. Same with the show. It is *far* from perfect, but it’s got its charms, and it’s better than Voyager. The show is about the first USS Enterprise starship, and it’s trying to be about voyage and discovery venturing into the unknown, and theme was meant reflect that.

Next is Star Trek: Discovery. It has a lovely theme. I love the call back to the original theme, with the modern imagery.

The theme really reflects the show. It is set right before the events of the original series, and includes some TOS characters like Captain Pike and Spock, and we even see an updated original USS Enterprise bridge in the 2nd season. The theme does a nice job of incorporating those elements, and set the stage for the show, classic but updated. It’s lovely.

And finally, Star Trek: Picard, who’s first season just wrapped up last week. This is a lovely lovely intro theme, and sets a very nice mood for this show. There are notes calling back to the themes of both TNG and Discovery (which is on the same network), something that is continued in the music of the show. Whenever Picard does something very Picard-like, we hear themes we recognize from TNG or TNG movies. It’s lovely, and the show is lovely. It’s not perfect, but it makes me very happy.

That’s it for Star Trek show themes, but there is so much more that could be said. I could write another essay on music from the movies. Hmm, perhaps for my next blog post. Seeing as we have some time on our hands now….