Sixth Night

Well technically not my sixth night observing but I am readjusting to normal day/night rythm.
Good news this morning: the S4G morphology paper was accepted. On astro-ph here
(starting Friday). That merited a happy dance. I should have a look at the follow-up as well tomorrow.

Meanwhile some work on a Lorentz center proposal and the SoeperSecretProject (that I tweeted about...) which is also going well. The BoRG paper is in dire need of being submitted to co-authors.
And my GHOSTS collaboration paper, the NHEMESES data paper, and the Andromeda Project early results also need writing up...

Productive week. Looking forward to going home though (kids have grown SO BIG in my absence). And apparently the weather in the Netherlands is more tropical than it is here...

Night Five; the last night.

This is the last night of observing and like a student cramming for an exam...I must watch out not to doublebook. It's too tempting to try to get all the objects in the run observed. I simply did not have the time for that!

Add to this that I have gotten steadily better at prioritizing the targets, and I end up wishing I had a night extra to mop up the last targets. I mentally file all this under "second guessing myself".

That said, the weather could not have cooperated any better. Superb seeing (less than 1 arsec, now it's 0.5...Hubble sees 0.1...). No techical glitches. Really nothing wrong. So excellent moment to wonder if my 30 min on as many targets as practical, supplemented with 15 min on (small but bright) targets is such a good idea. Or if I could have selected the targets better.

Feh. We have what we have. Time to generate that redshift catalog and fold it in with our SDSS master catalog.

Skyped with the Family again. Good to see the M cheerfully waving at Papa. I am nearly done. Now I have to remember how to reduce ISIS data. I have my MsC thesis notes somewhere...

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!