Phew... What a summer.
It has been so long since I have posted something in here. Sorry about that everyone. Turns out that most people like coming to an observatory in the nice summer weather and because of this, it gets fairly busy!
Right now though, the monsoons have hit... I know... monsoons. In Arizona. Here I am, coming from Oregon where I think I understand rain and I move to the "desert" where it should never rain right? But nope. My first week here someone told me that I was going to need an umbrella once the rain started. Being a typical Oregonian I said, PSH, I'm from Oregon! I totally understand and love rain. No worries. Imagine a 5 gallon bucket being dumped on your head, and that bucket never empties. That's what Flagstaff rain is like. Turns out I still need an umbrella...
Work has been going amazing! I've gone out to do some basic research with one of the astronomers twice now, I've had a lot of fun playing volleyball with some people up at the observatory, and I even got Neil Armstrong to wave at me! I'm fully trained in the job I'm doing, so I got my raise that I was promised and I have started working on other projects to help out the observatory. I may even get a big project helping out a co-worker that involves teaching kids robotics!
So now I will try to do this in an orderly manner... no promises though.
First off is the research. Larry Wasserman is an astronomer over at Lowell who is super interesting. Not only has he programmed ALL of the telescopes we use for research, he is one of the few people in the field who understands how to track objects that move in different directions of our earth. Now, when the earth rotates, we have to move telescopes at the same rate so that the stars don't appear blurry, and this in itself is fairly simple. When you want to study things like comets or asteroids that don't move in the same direction as what the stars appear to, then you run into problems. He programmed all of our research telescopes to be able to track in different directions so comet and asteroid research is possible. I got to go out with him two different times to track Keiper belt objects (KBO's). These are large asteroids, some the size of Pluto! He had a list of objects that he was tracking and would find the area of sky that the object was in, take a 15 minute exposure at the 72 inch telescope down at the Anderson Mesa facility, about 12 miles away from town. Then about an hour later he would photograph the same area of sky and he showed me how to find these objects moving around. You put one photograph on a computer screen in just the color red, and the second photo overlapped in Blue/Green. Any stars that haven't moved are all white, as the three colors that make up a computer screen are Red, Blue, and Green, and anything that is colored is a good candidate for being one of these KBO's. He would then plot the area of sky and the speed it was traveling in and actually update the worldwide database with the object's orbit and speed. Sometimes this will update the orbit up to a year in advance! It was a great opportunity to see if this was actually the kind of stuff that I want to be doing, and it really does seem interesting. Its nice to get a chance to see if I made the right choice by coming down here and I really believe I did.
The observatory has a sand volleyball court and I have gone from being very terrible to moderately good! I've made some great friends and met some awesome people who I've hung out with outside of volleyball. Turns out its a really fun sport too! Some of the players work at the observatory, in public programs like I do, and there are even some research astronomers who join us! In fact, the main push behind the games is Brian Skiff, an awesome astronomer who has been at Lowell for 40 years. Its been a lot of fun and it helps keep me in shape too. With the weather being stormy like it has been, we haven't been playing as much and the season has been winding down. But I've learned some fundamentals and may try to play some club volleyball later this year.
The Discovery Channel Telescope first light Gala was amazing. We had to dress up real fancy, and I got two awesome suit jackets (one for the gala, one for wearing in Vegas) for really cheap! I sat at a table with some really interesting people and had GREAT conversations with a lot of important people. The lady who was the liaison for the Discovery Channel workers was there so I got the behind the scene scoop of everything that had been going on with the filming of the special that will air on September 9th, all about the DCT. There was also an electrical engineer there who told me all about what a huge project like this takes from multiple engineering perspectives. Turns out that 10 years and 53 Million dollars requires a lot of work from a lot of people. Then came the speech by Neil Armstrong. He was so interesting and spoke directly to so many of the workers on this project. He was really inspiring and managed to make all of us laugh at his wit and charisma. He talked about his landing on the moon and how the entire procedure was all to run an experiment of shooting a laser beam at a mirror on the moon and seeing how long it took to get back. "I wasn't involved in the design of the experiment," he said, "I was just a technician. So I moseyed on over to the installation site to do my job." He told us that the very first thing that the mirrors did was fix the Latitude and Longitude of Wilson Observatory, the site that was running the experiment. Apparently when they first fired the laser, they didn't get anything back. After firing pulse after pulse, they realized they had the wrong coordinates for the observatory, so the very first experiment came in handy just for map purposes down here on earth! After that, they made SO many interesting discoveries over the next years. They found that the moon is moving away from us slowly, that the moon affects our tides, along with other discoveries. Mr. Armstrong showed us that even a simple experiment like that can unlock so much interesting information, and it really made the DCT more important in my mind. If just a simple mirror can tell us so much about our moon, this huge piece of technology should be able to unlock a LOT more information for us.
Neil Armstrong also showed us an awesome video someone had made of the Eagle lander landing, both with video from the actual lunar lander and set side by side to modern video images made by orbiting moon satellites today. You can watch this video along with the actual dialogue that happened between Houston and the Eagle here. It was SO cool to hear his thoughts during the video. He pointed a specific point out and went, "right here is where I knew I would need to steer the lander manually." So we got his entire thought process of what was going through is head as he landed. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I had such a great time! As he went to leave, I jumped up and waved at him from my spot near the back of the room. He waved back, and I'm just going to believe it was directed at me, cause that is too cool to pass up.
The rest will have to wait until next time, but I'll keep updating everyone on my summer and my current situation. Things are going great though, and really looking up! School is looking like something that may happen much sooner than I first imagined, which would be really awesome.
Until next time, be well, and clear skies!
