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!