Fourth Night

I'm on top of a mountain, on an island in the Atlantic ocean, in a six story building, of which the top three rotate, collecting light millions of years old to look for the signature of what amounts to sigar smoke floating in the hardest of vacuums. It's night four. It must be Wednesday.

Sometimes you have to phrase what you do, so you realize how frakkin' awesome this job really is. I got to go with the telescope operator (there is a different term for this job now but TO seems much better in my view...) and see the opening of the dome. Then I ran back down to the control room to do sky flats.

Observing is going well. The guys at the INT were not so lucky. The power outage has borked their contol computers and now nothing is happening there. I' lucky. Weather is good too. Double lucky.

The WHT telescope with the dome door. This is not a small door.

Opening with an allmighty noise. V. cool.

the INT. At least they managed to get the dome open...

looking up.

The ISIS spectrograph I'm using

Third Night of Observing

Third night on the WHT and we have the routine down. Calibration done and dusted in the afternoon, half hour exposures for 17 targets. A record.

This afternoon skype with the fam went ok. Connection keeps dropping at random points so there is a lot of "calling you back" and mimeing "can't hear you, hanging up".

I tinkered with a script to show the slits on SDSS images with APLPY. So far no joy. Now I *have* managed to plot a line on an image befoe but it eludes me why that trick won't work now. And re-re-re-submitted 2013e. Let's see how that one goes. Also: some writing on SUPERsecret project. ssh!

I'm running out of targets for the beginning of the night and easy targets (low airmass) overall. I may split the sample in those we only need 15 minutes for (just to get redshifts, nothing fancy) and those I will want to get high s/n with a 2 hour total exposure...

I had 7 hours of sleep. But the run down the trail was a little overambitious. Completely bushed now. Time for bed.

Second night observing

It's the second night observing and I am starting to feel it a little. I did manage to sleep some and after that went on the run that I resolved I would do every day (it's not that impressive but helps me wake up). Trick now is to stay awake. 

Yesterday's haul was a good one and this night is going pretty well so far. We tweaked the run scrips some, it turned out the blue arm chip needed to be windowed (faster readout), a result from a script crash last night. So we are on track to doing some 15 targets again tonight. If not more...

One new development: the new night assistant asked for printed finder charts. And with those, I have now determined some of the slit position angles using...a protractor...

I'm getting into odd pairs. For example, this is a little group of three galaxies in the overlapping catalog (here). None have a redshift yet. I did the central one and the top right. Later we'll revisit and include the edge-on too.

And then there is this odd pair (?) of galaxies. Clearly *something* is peaking out above the plane f this galaxy (look here). Maybe another face-on spiral? Maybe something else?

Investigations are ongoing. Meanwhile, I got my S4G morphology paper submitted again. Got some help from a statistician friend over twitter. Everyone should have a statistician friend.

on to the next thing on the todo list.

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.

A Different Problem

In Astronomy, the goal is often to obtain telescope time for a project. Some telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the new ALMA array in Chile, are especially competative as quite literally everyone could use the information from observations with those facilities to further their topic. Some are not quite as over-subscribed but it is still a competition. You really have to make you case well every time.

I quite enjoy writing proposals since it requires enthusiasm, honing my writing skills and the page limit kind of puts a lid on the usual caveats (a halfway-decent scientist always points all the possible flaws and weaknesses in their own method but no space for that in a proposal!).

So I tend to write a fair number of proposals...but I never expect the majority of them to make it. Especially in the case of the most competitive observatories. This round however, I won two separate observing runs on the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma and time on the JCMT telescope in Hawaii! And four (!) of the proposals I was on, made it for Hubble! I haven't even heard from ESO yet...

Now I'll need travel money to get there. A different problem altogether. A luxury one for sure but still a bit of an issue in the time of budget restrictions etc.