KPNO is messing with my head

So one of the things that Kitt Peak has been without for a few seasons has been an all-sky monitoring camera. Years ago we had CONCAM, which was great -- you could pull up a real-time panoramic image of the night sky to check for clouds, etc. Then CONCAM went away (for lack of funding I believe) and we had to go back to the old-fashion method of GOING OUTSIDE to check the sky.

The truly great thing about such cameras is that, if the camera imaging is archived, you can go back months later when you are actually analysing your data, and pull the camera loop for a given night and try and figure out why your data seems to be a lot suckier than you expected.

Anyway.

So KPNO just installed a new all-sky camera and life is good again. Plus you get all sorts of fun things showing up on the camera, like this little gem from two nights ago:

(The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, anyone?)

But then tonight, this image shows up, and my sleep-deprived, cabin-fever-addled brain just locked up. I mean, I was seriously confused for a while, until I figured out what had happened. Who can spot the problem? (Click the image for a larger view if you want to look hard....)


Anyway, thanks much to Kitt Peak for getting the new camera working!

Gonna be a long night...

I got up at 4am (EDT) this morning, flew to the observatory, and am running the telescope solo tonight. Moonrise is about 1am (MST), thank goodness; that's when I'll shut down.



Yes, it is gonna be a long night. Yawn.....

On Writing...

When I was writing my thesis long ago, this was taped to my office door. Twenty years later, it's still one of my favorites:


The look on Hobbes' face in panel two is priceless....

Soccer

We signed Abra up for soccer, her first experience with an organized(?) team sport. Her team is the Storm and her colors are yellow and black. (If I was naming a team of young children, I'd name them something really scary, like "The Whine" or "The Tantrum" -- FEAR THE TANTRUM! -- but that's just me...).

Today was her first soccer game -- her first practice, for that matter. Now for her first game, you'd like good weather. A nice spring day, warm, sunny, lush green grash, a slight breeze.... Uh, no. We had mid 40's, rain, wind, and here's what the field looked like:


Uh oh. But Abra was a gamer and was ready to go. We started with an introduction by the coaches, and then "footwork drills", which consisted of Abra showing off her running-like-a-girl skills.


After the drills, it was time for the much awaited game against the Comets. Abra played much of the game at right wing, and seemed to enjoy much of the first half. As you might imagine in a soccer game involving kindergarteners, there was basically a swarm of kids chasing the ball all the time:

There was some serious kicking going on in those scrums -- my shins hurt just watching it. And there was a good number of parents and coaches yelling "No, no! Kick the ball that way!" But the kids seemed to have fun.

Meanwhile, with no refs to yell at, Brenna had to content herself with hassling the coach, who is clearly throwing his hands up and begging "Lord, please save me from these soccer moms!".

(Heh, in seriousness, of course, she was not hassling him at all. I think she was sweet talking him to get Abra more playing time....)

Shortly after halftime, the inevitable happened, and Abra pulled a full gainer into a mud puddle.

The game turned a little less fun for her after that. It was cold and wet, and she was soaked and muddy. But she played on. Although I did her her ask her coach a few times "When is the game going to end?" and "Can I go out now?" The coach, to his credit, didn't immediately pull her when she asked, and so she kept plugging away and did fine. She did take a few moments now and again to assess just how muddy she had become...

She got a bit of a break from mud-running when she took her turn at goalie, and she made two saves. ("Saves" may be a generous term, admittedly, I think since both times the ball was just stuck in a mud puddle in front of the net and nobody wanted to kick it because it was so muddy...)
The gamed ended with a score of, um, well, I'm not sure anyone really knew, but the coaches agreed it was a tie. It might have been something like 2-2, I'm guessing. After the game, we had the traditional "juice boxes and cheez-its", and bless her little heart -- Abra made a special effort to make sure to ask for two of each, since her little sister had been a trouper throughout (even though she had fallen into a mud puddle of her own) and was standing nearby with no snack of her own....


So she did great. We got home, dumped everyone's clothes into the washing machine and tossed both girls into a hot bath.

Oh, and the best part? Abra's jersey number? Number 10. The same as the great Pele. See the resemblance?

And now that she's cleaned up and been fed, off she goes to her tap dance lesson. Now can Pele do that??

Earthshine

I was testing out the new CCD camera on the telescope tonight and took this picture of the moon:

So that gives you an idea of the field of view of the camera. And this is a shot of the crescent moon, actually, where the lit part of the crescent is off the field of view. So you are seeing just the part of the moon that is lit up by Earthshine -- the light from the Sun reflecting off the Earth and lighting up the moon. (Just like Moonshine can light up the Earth on an otherwise dark night -- and doesn't that sound like a slogan for cheap whiskey?).

(Actually, the very bottom part of the moon is in the lit part of the crescent, and you can see there's so much light there that the camera is starting to produce "bleeds" where the image is overexposed.)

Anyway, this camera's gonna be fun to use. Lots of science to be done with it!

First Light!

So I'm out at Kitt Peak (in Arizona) right now with Paul, working to get the new imaging CCD up and running on Case's Burrell Schmidt telescope. It finally saw the sky tonight, and so I thought I'd post a "First Light" image. So here is an image of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, raw off the telescope from a couple of hours ago. It's rough -- no image processing has been done to flatten the image, remove artifacts, etc. But here's it is, an expanse of Virgo 1.5 degrees on a side:

That's the giant elliptical galaxy M87 down at the lower left, and the elliptical M86 to the upper right. "Markarian's Chain" of galaxies is strung across the top.

With apologies to the folks at WIYN, I think we just might need to dub this CCD system the "Two Degree Imager".

OK, I'm pooped, and going to bed....