Today it is my (Rico) turn to write the blog. It has been great fun joining the observing run this past week, and I am impressed with the team. It feels a bit like being in the cockpit of a starship: everyone instantly knows what the 100+ buttons do on the six monitors controlling the instrument. It’s an organized chaos I’m quickly growing to love. However, since I have arrived, the seeing deities have not been in the spirit of giving. To appease the seeing gods special agent Joseph finished his all important mission: The Enstickening. With the sticker in its proper place, we optimistically set up the instrument for this nights observations.
The night started with Elena and Katie operating the instrument for Miles. Miles is focused on further validating the polarimetric mode of the instrument. He is hoping to generate some beautiful Polarimetric Differential Imaging images of protoplanetary disks.
After that we switched to Josh and Eden who spend the rest of the night star hopping for Leah, also in search of protoplanetary disks. It turns out Leah is remarkably good at finding previously unknown binaries for the hopping.
With only two observing nights remaining, a part of the group (among which the PI) called it an early night to start adjusting to a daytime schedule, and like the instrument says: “Als de kat van huis is, dansen de muizen op tafel”. We took full advantage, turning on DJ Haffert’s playlist and letting the music energize the final hours.
Just as things were settling into a rhythm, we got hit by a small earthquake. Some people quickly ran outside. However, I was too busy wrestling with a different kind of instability. I was trying to get the Neural Network (NN) to run its AO correction loop. When the ground is moving, and the control loop is fighting the atmosphere, you quickly learn what your priorities are. It’s fair to say my own internal NN has not been performing well on little sleep, as I almost walked straight into a Burro earlier this afternoon. The Burro was clearly not happy with this sudden close encounter, and I was also pretty startled. The instrument’s NN, however, survived the tremor, and helped us collect better data when the seeing was not ideal.
Fun ‘fact’ of the day: Donkeys Kill More People Than Plane Crashes
There are an estimated 44 million donkeys on the planet. A donkey kick can be anywhere between 0-2000psi, depending on the size and breed. As of 2013 there were 20000 planes on the planet. Due to these numbers it is safe to presume that this is true. In 2016 there were 325 aircraft related fatalities. In the same year there were 5478 admissions to emergency rooms across the world, 1478 of these resulted in the death of the donkeys victims. (the very reliable source: https://imgur.com/gallery/donkeys-kill-more-people-than-plane-crashes-QAhE6)
Song of the day
It is definitely better when not everything is in C.