Today was a special day; barbecue day. The saddest thing about this was that we just had our 24hour installation and observation marathon. Which meant that I missed barbecue lunch TT_TT. However, I realized that I hadn’t send it my night lunch form yet and I requested a dinner plate. I was still on time! This was a happy little accident as Bob Ross would call it.
Jared told everyone that we had to be together in the telescope control room at 19:30. He was very strict about it. We all wondered what that was about, probably to take a group picture? One of the major upgrades during this run is the addition of a differential polarization imaging mode. We added a polarization beam splitter to our science camera beam splitter cubes. And we made a remarkable discovery. Our 50/50 science beam splitter created the g-band ghost we have been chasing for a couple of years now. We put a left-over g-band filter and a post together to create our new g-band imaging mode that we can use without the beam splitters!
Another special part about the night was that Chile changed from summer time to winter time. I think this was the first time I ever had this happen during an observing run. This was a lucky streak for me because Duo the owl is always out to hunt you if you haven’t done your daily exercises. It became midnight and I was about to lose my streak but at the strike of midnight the clock shifted back by an hour! I was saved! I could keep my streak. It was also weird that the clock here goes back an hour at midnight instead of 3AM. Chile actually had a lot of interesting things happening with switching daylight savings. You can read all about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Chile .
I also saw a great Vizzy hopping around the Aux building. They are really cute animals!! Are you not entertained? Well back to beginning of today’s story. I got my barbecue fix during the night. It was great. But back again. Jared had all of us together at 19:30 because there was a big announcement:
I am really happy that I was awarded this prize for my work on adaptive optics up to now. And, I also want to congratulate my fellow awardees Maaike van Kooten en Rebecca Jensen-Clem. There is still much to look forward to in AO over the next 2 decades. So, stay tuned!
I watched Gladiator II on my flight to Santiago and I really enjoyed it. Gladiator is also one of my favorite movies. You should be able to find a famous quote from the movie if you read the blog post closely. For now I will just drop in the song “Now we are free” from the Gladiator movie. So all in all, lot’s of special things today and this is it for now and see you next time.