After very little sleep, I decided to wake up and treat myself with a scenic run around the mountain at noon. This was admittedly more of an excuse to go see some telescopes up close and personal.
After my makeshift tour of the exterior of some of LCO’s beautiful telescopes, I returned to find out Alycia was kind enough to take the time to set-up and bring a group of us on tours inside of both the Henrietta Swope telescope (1 meter) and the Irénée du Pont Telescope (2.5 meter). The Swope telescope is especially interesting because it was the very first telescope built at LCO back in 1971. It was also the one of the first, if not the first, telescope named after a woman. Henrietta made great contributions to work on variable stars and was a trailblazer for women in the field. The du Pont telescope is also one of the older telescopes at LCO, built in 1977.
Here is a look at the interior of the Swope and du Pont telescopes.
The night went smoothly, and Jay/Alycia were able to get some quality disk data shown below. We are also getting closer to correlating the accelerometer data with the wavefront sensor data. At this stage, the best approach is simple “you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home. All right, questions?”
Unfortunately, at the end of the night we had to say adiós to our new friend, María Eugenia, who is headed back to the Netherlands. Safe travels home and thank you for joining us on this run!
We are also looking forward to the next wave of people arriving the next day or two, and hope their travel goes better than our 50-hour ordeal!
Two skittish Burros were very hesitant greeting me on the way up the mountain.
After a long, hard, struggle to try to remember a recent/favorite movie of mine, it wasn’t till I remembered a conversation I had with Laird about UA’s Biosphere2 project/experiment that reminded me of one of my favorite movies, The Martian.
Song of the Day