Summer Break!

Yeah, I don't get one. Not that this is any different from every other job in the world, but still, everyone wishes they could go back to the days when they got to run from the school doors screaming all the way to the big yellow boat sent to deliver you to freedom. The finals have been taken, the classes are over and the grades have been delivered. So ends the first year of graduate school. While the year truly doesn't end until after the Qualifying Exam in September, all there is to do now is research and the occasional studying for the "Qual".

There might not be a summer vacation in graduate school, but research is a far cry from the class work that weighs you down during the rest of the year. Hell, I've been able to sit outside on my balcony and read... leisurely! I may still have to read user manuals, astrophysical papers and the like during the summer, but having the chance to sit down on a Saturday and read to RELAX is wonderful. The Crows, Squirrels, Chipmunks and Nuthatches all providing a symphony with which to sit back, relax and enjoy my day with a cup of coffee and a good book.

Observing Report: May 28

The night went exactly as planned. The clouds vanished around 8:30p and a modestly clear night ensued. The data set from the night is pleasing to the eye, but may not be worth while since the night was not perfectly photometric. Still, we shall see how good it comes out when I reduce it and analyze it in the coming weeks. It was a good end to the week as I now turn and head back to Dartmouth where I will finish up with classes and then enter into the summer months with a (hopefully) good set of data, all 22GB of it! I hope to have something to report on from this data set, and if I do, I will certainly let everyone know.

Fedora 11

A few days ago I posted a countdown timer for the release of Fedora 11, the latest in a long line of solid Linux operating systems. The countdown was down to just a handful of days but was recently bumped back a handful more! I found it odd when I saw the counter today that it had gone up! Obviously something needed to be taken care of, which is good to see that the Fedora people are not afraid to push a deadline back when something needs work. They generally do not scrap included packages unless it is entirely unlikely that the package will work with the new release. Microsoft, take note. Projected release dates are not set in stone, you can move them back! So what if geeks around the world will give you hell for delaying a week or so, the common user won't care if they have to wait for the latest version of Windows... generally, they won't even care that there IS a new release of Windows.

The latest version of Fedora looks very good, at first glance. With the inclusion of OpenOffice 3.1, the release will be great for the common user who needs their computer to check email, surf the web, and type word documents (and the occasional spreadsheet). If you're up for a slight adventure and would like to install a new OS that is NOT Windows, I would highly recommend it. The comfort of not having to worry about viruses, trojans, and malware is wonderful. If you are not up for the challenge, might I suggest, then, at least installing OpenOffice 3.1? They have added support for the Office 2007 extensions (those damn .xlsx .docx .pptx) that have been driving the world insane. It may not be quite at the level of Office, yet, but it is vastly approaching.

You may find OpenOffice 3.1 HERE

Pre-Observing Report

For the night of Thursday May 28: More clouds overhead. Ominous as they may look we are not supposed to get any rain... yay! Once again I feel that it will end up being like the past couple nights where the first couple hours are a loss and then the last 7 hours of the night will be decent. This also means I will more than likely be up doing dome flats past the early morning twilight. It won't be too bad today considering this is my last night so I will have to be up in the morning anyway so that I can catch my flight back to New Hampshire at 12:45p. Looks like it will be a long 24 hours... not slated to get back until 11p EST. So as I sit here with my bowl of soup for dinner/breakfast, I am crossing my fingers hoping for some decent seeing this night!

Observing Report: May 27

The night began as predicted. Storm clouds rushed in and sat overhead for the first hour or so. Once they cleared, and the weather predictions indicated that no more fronts were approaching, it was time to open the dome. Seeing was decent throughout most of the night. It wasn't until about 2:30a that things deteriorated. Seeing became horrible. Some sneaky cirrus clouds may have moved in unnoticed, I am still not entirely sure, but even at low airmasses the seeing was around 1.8" compared to the usual 1.2"->1.5". I tended to focus on objects that were yielding good images without adjusting the focus on the telescope since that can be a time consuming process. Once again the clouds hampered any opportunity to take evening twilight sky flats so I will once again be up a bit longer taking dome flats. Although I could more than likely use flats from other nights, since the detector has been kept at a constant temperature (-120 C), it is better to be safe than sorry and have dome flats on reserve just in case the sky flats from various nights highlight different detector characteristics. Aside from the clouds, no technical problems were encountered, thankfully!

Pre-Observing Report

For the night of Wednesday May 27, 2009: we are looking at cloudy skies for the first few hours, until around 11p according to cleardarksky.com. After the initial cloud cover, it is supposed to open up for the rest of the night for clear observing with good seeing. The winds look to be light, as they have been this whole trip, around 10mph, on average. It would seem that tonight will be much like last night in that the first part of the night will be spent waiting for the cloud cover to vanish, topped off with data that will be of good quality, but not the excellent quality that we are striving for.

Observing Report: May 26

Well I was finally able to open up last night around 8:30p. This didn't mean that the clouds had relented entirely. They persisted for a little longer, until around 9:00p. It turned out this wasn't too bad since I still needed to focus the telescope and get everything in order. I was able to observe 6 of my 8 objects and several of the photometric standard fields which are used to calibrate the images when it comes time to extract useful information from them. Conditions steadily improved over the course of the night and by 1:30a the seeing was down to about 1.2", allowing for some decent exposures. The data will still most likely not be of any use, though, since the conditions were not of the quality needed for scientific measurements. In the twilight of early morning, I was able to obtain sky flats in the R and I filters, or ~630nm and ~800nm pass bands. Since I was not able to obtain sky flats in the B and V filters, or ~430nm and ~540nm pass bands, I stayed up for about an hour longer in order to take dome flats in those two filters.