top of the world

i'm back where it all started, the Big Island - Hawaii.
Avishay and i have two observing nights with Keck, the largest (optical) telescope on earth.
We have a busy night ahead of us, including observations of many objects and there's hardly any room for errors, as any minute of observing time is important.
flying over the pacific ocean, we saw a thick blanket of clouds under us and started to get worried... but as we approached Hawaii, we saw that the clouds are actually under the mountain.

if you look at the summit, you can see a few white domes. the most right one is Subaru, a Japanese telescope with a silvery dome that reflects the sun like a mirror... (btw, "subaru" is the "Pleiades" constellation). left to it are two twin ball-shaped domes, these are Keck1 (which i'll be using) and Keck2. more to the left are some other smaller domes.
[i had to set the shutter time as short as possible, because the plane was shaky..]

here's a closeup from 2 years ago... (the one in the center isn't mine. i probably grabbed it from the internet :) but that's probably how it looked, if you were above the mountain looking at our plane...)

Palomar pics

sorry it took so long.. here are a few pictures:

Itamar, demonstrating how dry the air was. When we try to show a similar effect to students in TA, we need to turn the A/C on full blast, and dry the air with a hair-dryer... On Palomar, it occurred naturally.

Inside the dome of the Palomar 60" telescope. the images look red because the very faint lights inside the dome were red, to help the observers not loose their night vision. i took long exposures (about 20-30 seconds), that's why it looks so bright. to the naked eye, the dome was quite dark and if not careful, we would stumble upon all the kids. i don't know who the people on the left picture are, but the telescope is looking at jupiter, which you can see through the hatch in the dome. in the picture on the right, you can see Eran looking through the telescope. he had to stand there without moving for 20 seconds.


This is the Hale 200'' telescope at Palomar. it's huge. really. and the done is one of the biggest in the world, since this telescope is the largest one that operates on such a mount (one part of it is pointing directly to the north, so it takes more space when it moves around)


In the control room, just by the telescope. Eran's in charge of the instruments (cameras, filters, exposure times, etc.) and Jean at the back is in charge of the telescope itself (pointing it, acquiring the guide-star, opening and closing the dome...).



The Hale 20'' telescope, at night. in this 30'' exposure you can barely make the telescope inside the dome, but the milky way is clearly seen, as the whitish "cloud" crossing from the bottom right of the picture to its top. the constellation Sagittarius or Teapot marks the center of the galaxy. the red clouds, are illuminated by city lights from San Diego bay. although they don't do any good to astronomy pictures, i think they add an interesting feature to the picture.
[sky maps]


A long exposure inside the dome.

Palomar

17:30. i'm at the observing room in the dome of the 200'' telescope on mount Palomar, aka P200. it's always great to go to telescopes (at least for me, other people may object), and this one in particular. it's big, friendly, familiar, and has all the advantages of being an observing site: it's on a top of a mountain, not too many people around, peaceful and quiet. I wrote about my last visit here. click on the here for a detailed map of the summit.

we drove up to the mountain yesterday, and joined a couple of families from the Kibutz who headed out an hour or two before us. they had set a camp a few miles from the summit, and after having dinner there (mmmmm... all sorts of israeli things... salad, labane...) we all went to the 60'' (1.5m) telescope. once a month in the summertime, that telescope opens its dome to public outreach, for the "friends of Palomar" (you can be a friend if you make a donation, duh). last night was one of these times. the telescope's scientific routine was stopped, all instruments removed, and instead the operator put an eyepiece. yes,
an eyepiece on a 60'' telescope!!! it's a rare experience, to look with your naked eye through a telescope this big. the visibility was very good, and everybody took turns looking through the telescope at a variety of astronomical objects: jupiter, a couple of globular clusters, the cat-eye nebula, the ring nebula... it was absolutely amazing. you could see colors and everything. usually when i go out with my amateur-astronomers friends and look through their (8-10'') telescopes, it seems like i have to try really hard to see a fuzz in the middle of the field, and strain my brain to admit that it looks kinda like the images i know and love.
the kids had a lot of fun too. Itamar was my new best friend, and wouldn't go anywhere without me. it's pretty awesome. sometimes i meet a kid that actually makes me want to have one some day :) (moms, don't get excited. i said some day). he kept asking questions and challange me with the most basic things (why are there trees? what is special? what is force? how come there's a sun? and on and on... some of these came in a long chain of questions, each following an answer to the previous one).

i took many many pictures, hopefully one or two of them will be any good. it's hard to do anything with so little light and objects that keep moving... i really hope that the one i took of eran looking through the eyepiece wil be good, it will make some people i know green of envy.
this morning, we went over to the 200'' telescope with everybody. it's always amazing to see this huge telescope in this huge dome. we climbed all the way up to the "prime focus", basically got all the way to the top and stood above the telescope. not a task for those afraid of heights.

tonight i'm joining eran for his observing night, that will start in a few hours. We are now taking some calibration exposures (basically, taking images of nothing, so that when we observe the real sky we have a "zero" baseline to compare to). In an hour or so we'll go have dinner, and then start the real observations when it gets dark enough. i think it's going to be a slow night, there's not much on the observing list for some reason. i'll try and tell about it here, as the night goes by...

18:16. Still working on calibrations. At 18:30, we'll go down to the "Monestary" for observers dinner.
19:12. back from dinner. we had salad, potatos in some creamy-cheesy sauce, ground beef meatloaf and green beans. comfort food ;). the chocolate cake dessert wasn't eatable. the cook/house manager at the monestary prepared a night meal for each of us, with our choice of sandwich, fruit, and pop. i added salad leftovers for later. who knows, maybe i'll feel like doing something healthy for a change.
Eran's doing some more calibrations now before sunset. if i'm not needed, i think i'll go out with cami and see if there's anything worth taking more pictures of; i like how the light looks like when the sun is low.
19:40. when the technician says "No light going in the instrument" it's a bad sign... tech gay goes to see what's wrong with the telescope, as Eran fills the kettle with water for tea.
20:10. the tech guy rebooted the main computer. it's basically the only think i know how to do when things go wrong ;) the sun set behind the horizon at 20:04 california time, just a few minutes ago. i took some nice pictures around/of/from the telescope, i'll add them to this post later.
21:20. the thech tried to do his magic (which included him being in the prime focus doing something, while shouting instructions through the speaker to start and restart and re-restart the system) all of which didn't work. sometimes you just have bad luck. finally, we decided to give up on the IR camera and only take spectroscopic data tonight. i took a long exposure picture while the telescope started observing it's first target for tonight.
00:48. the telescope is observing, and Cami is observing the telescope. i took some more long exposures, until the battery drained. while it's charging, i'm having nice conversations with the telescope operator, Jean. She just visited chicago a few weeks ago, and now reading City of the Century -- the book Ben read when we just moved in. So we talked a bit about chicago. she's very talkative and very nice, and a good astronomer :) whe discovered many comets... wait! she has a wikipedia entry!!
03:10. tired. 2 hours to go...
03:40. damn, it's so dry here. my lips are so sore... :(
...
the rest of the night went by, i went out a couple of times to get some fresh desert-feeling air, and eventually we closed the dome at 6. i fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, and woke up (about 5 minutes later) at noon, to drive back to pasadena.
all in all (besides some mosquito bites and my dried lips) it was a wonderful weekend. the only thing i regret is not having ben there with me. don't worry my love, next time i won't let you miss it :)

...
back in pasadena. i downloaded all the pictures to my laptop, but i'm too tired to upload them now... plus i have to get up early tomorrow. so... be patient, i'll put them on the blog tomorrow :)

A Tiny Fire in Chicago

So I finally have a functioning laptop again,and I can begin to catch up on some of the posts I've been meaning to do for some time. The first is short. We took the "L" downtown on June 30th for the Taste of Chicago (see next post), and were seated in the first car, as we like to do for opportunities such as this one. Going south on the tracks between Wilson and Sheridan, the train came to a stop, as it so often does. Usually, you have no idea what the cause is, but this time we did. Our driver got out to investigate:
FIRE!!
You can't see the flames very well, but they were there consuming a wooden tie next to the third rail of the northbound track. Our driver calmly returned to get a fire extinguisher. You can see the extinguisher is really just a stream of water (next picture), which prompted a discussion (Keren and me) of the third rail problem (see here or the Mythbusters, Episode 3) - why (thankfully) doesn't she get electrocuted when the water hits the third rail?

They couldn't have shut the power off on the tracks, because another train came along and waited for here to put the fire out. By this time, our brave photographer (Keren) was leaning out the door taking pictures with her new toy.

All of this begs the question of how often little fires like this happen. The train often stops for seemingly no reason, and this is one of the first times where we could clearly discern what was going one. A few passengers in our car were a bit panicky, but the driver was very calm and professional.

I looked around a bit on the web, and found other instances (Aug 2005, Jan 2005, Aug 2003) of this on CTA, one underground (the underground one is on the CTA Tattler - maybe we should contribute?). These were a bit larger apparently, and those that occurred underground have to be slightly distressing. From this extremely small sample, we can conclude with minimal confidennce that news-making CTA fires occur roughly once a year.

Tweetle Beetles (or: bed-time story)

What do you know | about tweetle beetles? | well... |||| When tweetle beetles fight, | it's called | a tweetle beetle battle. || And when they | battle in a puddle, | it's a tweetle beetle puddle battle. || AND when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, | they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle. | AND... || When beetles battle beetles | in a puddle paddle battle | and the beetle battle puddle | is a puddle in a bottle... || ...they call this | a tweetle beetle | bottle puddle | paddle battle muddle. | AND... | When beetles | fight these battles | in a bottle | with their paddles | and the bottle's | on a poodle | and the poodle's | eating noodles... || ...they call this | a muddle puddle | tweetle poodle | beetle noodle | bottle paddle battle. | AND... || Now wait a minute | Mr. Socks Fox! || When a fox is | in the bottle where | the tweetle beetles battle | with their paddles in a puddle | on a noodle-eating poodle. | THIS is what they call... || ...a tweetle beetle | noodle poodle | bottle paddled | muddled duddled | fuddled wuddled | fox in socks, sir! || Fox in socks, | our game us done, sir. | Thank you for a lot of fun, sir. |||

Happy 4th of July!

It's my 2nd time here (in Pasadena) during 4th of July. As we did 2 years ago, we drove to a hill above the Rose Bowl Stadium, where all the cool fireworks were going on, and settled down with the rest of usa to wait for the show.
[map]
Of course Cami wanted to come too, and most of the time i took pictures hoping to get some nice ones. here's the result:


Einav, Udi, Eran, Itamar, Orly, Avishay, Shachar and Maya (left to right), on a top of a hill above the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, where we went to watch the 4th of July fireworks. [~1'' exposure + flash]


Eran and Maya


Avishay and Shachar

Maya

Orly's tummy is pregnant

hi from Pasadena :)
i keep being surprized by Orly's tummy. in my mind it should be as flat as usual, and whenever Orly gets up from behind the table or enters the room i'm surprized to see the big watermelon that she seems to carry under her shirt :)
maybe i'll get used to it in a couple of days.

Pasadena is HOT. it's hot at 9 am already, and will be hotter. baaaaaaaaaa. hope i survive it.