the international space station!

this little red dot is the iss as seen from kitt peak. it was awesome to watch it pass by every night!

what is this? a center for ants?

so here's where we are. and that's the moon lighting up the telescope dome enough to have it and the stars in the background too.

tonight has been much more successful than last night. major software issues seem to be resolved or at least saving themselves to come about at a much more inconvenient time. I've actually been running the telescope, so i tell it how long to take an exposure and which filter - but we have a night assistant that actually does the moving of the telescope. I like having a night assistant because if something bad happens, it's almost like instant tech support...or at least he knows who to contact to fix any problems.

I did get to watch ISS go by again before we started with images and attempted to get a picture, but my camera hardly picked up venus (the brightest thing in the sky tonight) so i didn't even try with ISS. We are also having a minor ant infestation due to some chocolate that was left open from people doing data reduction this afternoon.

i currently have a sinus infection, so i have occasional coughing fits which means long periods of sleep are a challenge. but, man, i had the best nap this afternoon after about 5 hours of on and off sleep after week shut down the telescope at sunrise. after tomorrow night's run which will end around 6 my time, we have to get down the mountain and to the airport for our flight back to tuscaloosa at 1:30. I'm counting on sleeping on the plane because when i get back to tuscaloosa I'm going with friends to see twilight, which is the new book series being turned into a movie franchise. I actually read the book on the travel day to get here and got completely sucked in, so I'm pretty pumped to see the movie this week too.

as the dome turns

galaxyzoo project take 2:
2 hours in and we haven't actually gotten to look at anything.

I did end up driving myself up the mountain today and i didn't even get lost! it's actually a very nice drive. nice views, lots of cacti, indian reservation, illegal immigrant checkpoint...the usual. they sent me in a hybrid which was fun, but I didn't know it was a hybrid and kind of wondered why there was an extra gauge with pictures of a battery. it was pretty fun to drive.

telescope is broken for the time being, so we're taking advantage of this by taking pictures of venus and saturn which are very bright right now in the sky AND we went out in the cold to watch the ISS pass over. Endeavor is docked so i got to see both.


since i've just been playing on the internet so far on this observing run, here are images from april:

excuse me, but there IS cause for alarm

so I'm pretty sure I only slept for like 2 or 3 hours this morning...and I'm still not sure how that happened. we shutdown the telescope around 530 and my supercool self woke up at 930. it should add some extra deliri-oscity to tonight. so here was sunset:I just went out to try to take pictures of the stars on my spiffy new camera, but i couldn't take a long enough exposure. boo. and here are chris and I modeling for dr. keel's artsy streak:

omg so these grad students from Indiana came in from a different telescope to borrow a level since they were having trouble finding objects, but one of the kids looks EXACTLY like Dale from Greek.

in addition to operating the WIYN tonight, we are also remotely operating the SARA down the road, so that's added an extra twist to the evening. I'm still shortcutting my way through the data since we still haven't quite gotten the exact way to work yet.


time: 2:50 am
current soundtrack: jingle bells
currently tired of: being shocked by EVERYTHING, not sleeping, not seeing my friends


it's about 5 now and we're finishing up the last image so it's almost bedtime! sorry for the serious post...maybe i'll get my humor back once i get some sleep...

would you like to run your victory lap now?

I'm back at Kitt Peak, but this time with Dr. Keel and Chris Lintott...and at the WIYN telescope.
There are 17 computer screens in the control room right now. thankfully we're only using 13 of them. but there are 5 of us, so that makes it a little better.

The picture is of the WIYN telescope taken from the SARA telescope. WIYN is the funny shaped one. and I'm currently sitting in the rectangular box to the left of the dome.

I am currently running 3 computer screens at once, so now that only leaves 2 not in use. I'm amazing at multitasking. I'm attempting to reduce the data we just collected on a galaxy AND I'm slowly getting through the 300ish new posts on my google reader that I collected for the long nights. It's already 330 back in alabama so I'm doing pretty amazing in beating my bedtime.


we've finally gotten some good images. and we've invented our own Rorschach inkblot test...with galaxies.


here is the chicken nebula (ok so we didn't make this one up, but try to look at this and NOT laugh!)















this one is a fried egg and sausage, but what kind of sausage is this color?? a german sausage. and it's also got the random lumps and spots like this galaxy.











we've decided this could either be a black widow or a waving blue bird.

















here is a crab with one claw and a broken leg.












and now it's 4:30am and we're finishing up and then it is def time for bed...assuming the coffee doesn't keep me awake!