Havin' a Good Time at the Teleskop

Yesterday I flew back out to the observatory for a week. Before I left, Thalia gave me this on her way out the door to school:


That's me at the telescope, looking at Jupiter and a star.

Refrigerator Graffiti

So I walked into the kitchen this morning and found this:



(for those of you who don't know, my first name actually is James)

Evidently the author ran out of refrigerator magnets at that point, leaving us all to wonder in what domain I'm the best looking. I'd like to think the intent was to finish with "...in the world" or "...in recorded history", rather than "...in this house". But we will never know....

Abbott and Costello meet Mick and Keith

I am driving to the store today with the girls in the backseat, and we are all listening to Exile on Main Street. "Happy" came on. And we had the following exchange:

Me: Hey, girls, tell me: Who's singing?
Abra: Mick Jagger
Me: Nope, trick question, it's Keith!
Thalia: Well, who's playing guitar?
Me: Keith is playing. And Mick, too, I think.
Abra: Mick plays guitar?
Me: Yeah, sometimes.
Thalia: No, no, I mean the *other* guitar player. What's his name? Ronnie Wood?
Me: No actually, on this album it was Mick Taylor.
Abra: Mick Jagger?
Me: No, Mick Taylor.
Thalia: I thought it was Ronnie Wood.
Me: No he came later.
Abra: Was Mick Taylor the one who took the bad medicine?
Me: The bad medicine?
Abra: Yeah, the one who took the bad medicine and died.
Me: Oh, no, that was Brian Jones, he came before Mick Taylor.
Abra: Oh.
Thalia: Oh.

It was kind of like a Rolling Stones version of "who's on first?"

Pretty Picture

Wow, I've been lax about updating the blog -- things have been kind of hectic lately. And I'm afraid it's gonna continue this way until late April, sorry.

In the meantime, let me at least show you this really cool picture of our telescope out at Kitt Peak, taken the other night by an ex-student of mine, Steven. Click on the image to see it full size, then come back and read how he did it.



To take this picture, he set up the camera on a remote scaffold,
pointed at the observatory dome. The camera was set to take a three
minute long timed exposure; during this time, he walked back inside
the observatory (you can see his flashlight trail bobbing along to the
lower right), and rotated the dome so that the dome slit -- the
opening in the dome that the telescope looks through -- rotates across
the telescope (and Steven himself!). So the dome slit acts like a slow
moving shutter exposing the telescope to the camera -- the net result
is a "cutaway" effect, giving the appearance of no dome in front of
the telescope at all.

Simultaneously, the Earth's rotation makes the stars slowly travel
across the sky as the camera exposes, so that instead of looking like
dots, the stars appear as streaks in the sky. The three stars of
Orion's belt are visible just above the dome; Betelguese shows at the
top center of the image; and the bright star Sirius appears to the far
left. At far right, the moon can be seen low in the sky.

My jaw kind of hit the floor when he sent this to me. It came out
incredibly well.

Just thought I'd share. Beautifully done, Steven...