If there ever was a day to wake up for lunch, Sunday is that day. While we all placed our much anticipated empanada night lunch orders, nothing beats the pastry goodies paired with the lunchtime soup choices.
Though delicious, the prize lunch came at the cost of some significant sleep debt for members of our crew. Nevertheless, we rallied, drank our little coffee drinks, and went right back up the hill for an afternoon of testing, bug fixing, and poking around on the internal source. I have no photos to show you the productive daytime endeavors, but I do have the motivational poster now stuck to the control room wall to sum up the energy of the participating members.
Turns out if you wake up early enough, you can have a whole day before your observing work day. Enjoy these vignettes from our afternoon on the mountain.
Our empanada appetites did not overwhelm our TO Rebecca, who was able to muscle our nighlunch up the hill. We arrange the spread to remind ourselves of the richness and abundance of life.
The first half of the night was shepherded by Parker, Katie, and Josh. We’re back on tau Ceti with the bells and whistles (iEFC dark holes and almost all the datastreams writing). The seeing gave us a good reason to work a little extra on internal source set up before it settled down to a fairly typical if a bit bumpy LCO night.
At 1am, Parker and I switched. This was actually a big night for me! Though I’ve assisted with observations at telescopes since I was 19, this is the first time I’ve gotten to take data for my own science on my own proposed-for time. I always try to be a diligent AO operator, but it feels different for your own data. (The difference is anxiety.)
Our time on Beta Pic is split in two goals, firstly to try to push into bluer wavelengths (r’ band) where the contrast of Beta Pic b depends on the kind of atmosphere it has, and secondly see if we can observe the closer in Beta Pic c at all. Thank you Katie and Laird for installing the ri beamsplitter cube that makes these goal somewhat simultaneous.
Since Beta Pic c is so close in, and given all the good PIAA work from yesterday, we used the PIAACMC to improve our inner working angles. Thank you Elena for her PIAA expertise, and Tiffany for sticking it out with us for the rest of the night. We wrapped up not too far after our TO gave us the 15 minute warning.
Miles did not lock in on photoshop for his masterpiece to fail to make an appearance on the blog. The whole team in one photo! How lucky to be planet hunting with them all.
Fun Fact: Pablo Neruda’s favorite soup
As Duo Lingo likes to remind me, I really need to work on my Spanish. As I was ordering my soup, the chef very excitedly explained something I only vaguely understood to be about Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet. I since learned, and now you will know this too, that the soup from lunch today was popularized by Neruda’s “Oda al caldillo de congrio” (Ode to Conger Chowder). The conger chowder is one of many everyday items Neruda romanticized in his series of Odes, among soap, socks, and salt. It is considered today one of the most popular Chilean dishes, partially because of his love for how it represents Chile.
“… deliver
the treasure to the flame,
until in the chowder
are warmed
the essences of Chile,
and to the table
come, newly wed,
the savors
of land and sea,
that in this dish
you may know heaven.”
– Pablo Neruda
Song of the Day:
Wait what do you mean Katie hasn’t used a Stroke’s song yet?