Tag: 2015B

Hello Everyone,

Having just finished up three nights over in Baade, the MagAO team has very hospitably welcomed me (Kate R.) as their guest tonight.  As you may have heard, last night didn’t go so well, giving Katie and me the opportunity to poke around in the Baade dome at 1am:

 

Fortunately, today the clouds have slowly dissipated, although not before painting us a beautiful sunset:

Just after sunset, Katie took me into Clay, and showed me the MagAO team’s handiwork.  Although I wasn’t sure how to feel about the LEDs on back of their secondary poking out of the dome in the middle of the night, altogether it was an impressive sight.  Made me wish I were one of these cool instrument builders myself!

Anyway, after the tour we had a quick Hanukah Baruch by Alycia:

And then it was down to business.  Actually, there was some waiting around as those clouds moved along, but my understanding is that there has been serious data collection happening for several hours now.  (I must admit to being a bit distracted by my own data as all of this was going on.)

Re: tonight’s musical selection, I must first offer my sympathies to any of you who may have found yourselves tricked into watching Kate F.’s video.  One of the many confusing aspects of that selection was the incongruity of the music and the stark gas station / desert setting.  I obviously didn’t understand the lyrics, but the melody reminded me of 5th grade choir.  Working with that theme, I googled “incongruous music videos”, and this was the top hit:

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

I’m headed out tomorrow, but it was a great privilege and great fun to be able to join the MagAO party this week!  Here’s wishing them the clearest of skies and the best of seeing for the rest of 2015B.

 

 

I’m glad to not have to come up with anything terribly clever to say tonight, since Jared and Katie already gave away the 2015B blog award (deservedly, to Amali Vaz).

Here is why I’m having my own private pity party right now…

and a zoom in on the wind data…

My two nights are up, and unfortunately I’m not going to have much to show for them science-wise. This is through no fault of Jared and Katie, who went to heroic efforts to swap all of the BCU fibers in just 15min last night. Tragically, the wind made their efforts mostly moot. We did manage to observe one target as it was setting away from the wind though, and there’s still hope for me to get some more 2015B data. Alycia Weinberger arrived today and will be observing for the next 5 nights. Some of my targets overlap with hers, so I may be able to piggyback on her observations. Fingers crossed for the stars (good seeing, no clouds, low winds, and dry air) to align tomorrow!

Alberto’s Hero song last night reminded me of a Japanese song called “Hero” that I used to sing at karaoke a lot when I was living there in 2004-05. In fact, the only versions of it that I could find on YouTube were of people singing it at karaoke. This guy is pretty good though and you can see the original music video on the TV. In fact, even if you don’t like the singing, you should play the real song in a separate browser and watch this video on mute so that you can see all the sweet dance moves.

Speaking of sweet dance moves, MJ always cheers me up…

Things are going well this week and the weather is ok.
Waiting for the new star wars movie, here we go!!!

The song of the day, speaking of Jukebox Heroes and Blockbuster movies: Hero by Chad Kroeger:

And a picture of myself for Alberto:

Except when corrupt databases and/or fiber communication problems force us to do a hard reboot of the whole system, and there’s not enough time before sunrise to make it worth bringing it all back up again. Then we stop, even with stars in our eyes.

In keeping with tonight’s outrageous claims on astro-ph, we observed an Earth-sized object around a very nearby star. See Skemer and Close, 2011 for more info.

Since Katie just went with “not US-based” as her connection last night, I’ll just go with “Foreigner” and one of the all time classics.

If I could play guitar, I’d be in a rock band (I forgot to mention that I’ve seen Danzig live — front row right on the rail the whole show. He gave my best friend a high five.) If I could hit a curve ball I’d be chasing my cup of coffee still. The Navy wouldn’t promise me enough sea time on a fast attack, too many boring options. So I’m an astronomer now I guess. Still not sure what I’ll be when I grow up, but there’s still that one guitar.

Day 22, Kim is helping a lot, Kate R. arrived today, Kate F. arrives tomorrow, astigmatism is fixed, MagAO is well.

Things with holes worn through:

Dawn run yesterday:

Sunrise today:

Yesterday’s song of the day was by Dawid Podsiadlo from Poland. Today’s song of the day is by another overseas David, Davido Adedeji Adeleke from Nigeria: