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: