Dear Gentle Readers:
My name is Amali and I come from the LBTI and while I am superlative in many ways, generating coherent sentences from real words is not one of them. However! Katie (after, perhaps, too many nights of my not-sentences) says I am allowed to just blog pictures and diagrams, so, here, CHECK OUT THESE SWEET FIGURES:
1. THE SCENE
a. Here is the LBT, with salient features labeled. It is large, binocular, and a telescope.
b. Here is Magellan! Also labeled. It is a Portuguese explorer dude from back in the day.
2. A COMPARISON
a. The LBT is, ahem, not known for good seeing. Here, for instance, is a DIMM plot from an LBTI run that I stole from our blog. The DIMM bottoms out at 0.5″, and maxes at 3″, and on this particular night we went off the charts IN BOTH DIRECTIONS so take that you snootyfaces.
b. Here is tonight’s Mag seeing, from Baade. 0.45, it says. I cannot even count below 0.5. I am sure that 0.45 is a very nice number, but, alas, it is not one I can comprehend.
3. A HYPOTHESIS
a. LBT is home to malicious flying dragon squirrels. They delight in whatsit, um, fancy word? Schadenfreude! Yes. And they accomplish this by breathing fire to mess up the seeing.
b. Frankenrabbit has better things to do.
4. CONSEQUENCES BOTH EXPECTED AND NOT
a. We get this at LBT too: in good seeing the pupils get all sloshy. NO it is not TT overdriving! If anything, it’s underdriving…that stays underdriven until it’s overdriven. But that’s terrible! Good seeing should be a time of joy, not a time of tip-tilt messes and people going FIX UR GAINS KID!
b. They start the entire AO lock with THREE BUTTONS which means you ONLY CLICK THREE TIMES and I get twitchy because things so simple can’t possibly be doing what I want, right? CLICK. MUST CLICK. CLICK CLICK. It is hard when things work! If I’d only clicked more gain buttons you wouldn’t have to look at all these diagrams!
5. A LEGEND IN THE FLESH
TJ is here. I met TJ. I had not met TJ before, because he left just as I arrived, BUT he is the legendary scapegoat/mascot/dearly departed of LBTI, and I have spent many a night telling (completely made up) TJ stories. Like, remember the time TJ chased a goat into a bear’s nest and then fell off the mountain? That was epic. Anyway, my mental picture of TJ was kinda…part Daniel Boone, part Mr. Bean, and part Gangnam Style Guy.
Now that I’ve met him… I had him down pretty well, actually.
6. INCIDENTALLY, SCIENCE
Possibly this section is best left to the science types, but WHATEVER, I had to fill up some time without clicking things, so here.
a. VISAO! We looked at Sirius and the seeing was incomprehensibly good and Jared had this mesmerizing display of a visao psf. I can’t do it justice in drawings but here:
b. Back when I was a spring chicken or something, my favorite thing was the APP, even though I’d never actually seen one in action. UNTIL TONIGHT because BOOM Katie got this on Clio:
I <3 U APP
7. THE SONG
You guys, I HATE winter, what are you even doing, this is the summer world! Southern hemisphere, friends. WARM. DESERT. Like in this song. Also, the dance in the middle is LIEK TOTALLY TJ. …right?