First Night

Tonight was the first night of ISIS observations. The clear blue sky at dinner held the promise of good conditions. Seeing at 0.6 arcsec (really good) and relatively smooth operations all round. I had some minor hiccups (oops this chip was left at fast readout, stuff like that) but on the whole good first part of the run. Of the science goals, redshifts should be no issue, spectral classification also in the bad but the attenuation curves are going to be challenging. I keep wondering if/how much I should increase integration times. But as always, it is probably better to parcel time between two object rather than spend it all on one.

This afternoon, I was still frantically obtaining position angles for all my targets. And the Skype call with the family was not very successful thanks to the spotty internet in my room. What it conveyed most was that Marten missed his papa and Charlotte would like to pack up and go to "her house".
Then I accidentally ran late getting to my instrument orientation. Fortunately ING staff know what they are doing. I got all set up and it's going well. Paid the man in stroopwafels of course.

oh and did I mention I ran for a bit? There is a trail that starts near one of the helipads. Let's see if I can do it again later today.

Position Angle

Start of an observing week at the WHT on La Palma. Spent the day talking to the friendly ING staff on the Snowhite project (do all dwarfs have dusty beards?) and the scheduling and configuration of the service observations they will be doing later in the semester for another SoeperSecret project.

Meanwhile, I still need to determine the positon angle of the slit for the observations that are going to start tomorrow night. Slow but steady progress. With some finagling these long-slit observations of occulting pairs of galaxies can hold quite a bit of information in one go. Thanks to the GalaxyZoo, we are certainly not lacking in targets!

Fire up the Paper Zamboni

The ESA fellowship is coming to a close and it is time I cleared up some almost-finished papers. Thee is a lovely result from GalaxyZoo 2 data (now public so I'd better hurry up), the S4G morphology paper has a second referee rapport (nothing major, just some minor revisions, all take time), the BoRG survey paper on Galaxy M-dwarf is close to be ready and needs to go to the co-authors (some minor revisions...more time & mental cpu), the GHOSTS paper on the stellar structures in the NGC891 halo need a major revision before it goes back to the team, just got the data on background galaxies in the Andromeda Project that is just begging to be turned into a short paper (classic case of me productively procrastinating...the key is "productively" right?)...so much to do!

Observing run in a week and half too. Occulting galaxies. Working title: the SNOWHITE project.
Talk to prepare, target list to finalize.

Guess vacation is over. Better sweep up those papers and get going.