Urania

We had a set of hard storms come through yesterday afternoon. I was doing SkyWarn spotting with the local hams. I think (but will leave it to experts to confirm) that the structure under the smooth part of the storm (”the shelf) is a wall cloud. For a sense of scale, this is 8 photos stitched together covering above a fifth of my horizon and the leading edge of this storm when it was about five miles away.. Shortly after I shot this picture, the sirens went off. Rotation was spotted, but luckily, no funnel cloud touched down. Thankfully, while the storm blew through at 60 miles per hour, we had no significant damage… Still, it looked mean…

Addendum: I sent the picture to Greg Gust, who runs some of the SkyWarn stuff for the National Weather Service in Grand Forks. He sent me these additional comments:

Most of the structure is a classic shelf cloud on the leading edge of a line of thunderstorms… this the widespread strong to severe winds as it came through. One the south end was the feature that we believe was a wall cloud… rotating updraft… and was what prompted us to issue the Tornado Warning across the southern part of Fargo and Moorhead.

This was posted on my friend John Martin’s blog. He is an astronomer and an educator, like myself. As finals roll around and students realize that slacking off in the class is going to have consequences, they get… creative. Here is John’s post:

This warning should be posted under my class in the course offering directory:

WARNING The Astronomy-Physics program has determined that doing poorly in Astronomy 101 may have deleterious impact beyond your GPA. Students failing Astronomy 101 report a higher incidence of: deaths of grandparents, close relatives who discover they have cancer, chronic personal health problems, influenza outbreak, computer hardware failure, traffic accidents, complete melt down of their university email account, death of beloved pets, and inability to find adequate child-care services. A high degree of correlation has been observed, however the cause-effect relationship is still under study. Students should be advised to enroll in this course and take it lightly at their own risk.

[From Warning About Doing Poorly in Astronomy Class]

During our observing run at CTIO, Dr. Roberta Humphreys lamented apparent disappearance of a pack of foxes that liked to hang around the observatory. The cooks, who had traditionally tossed out some scraps to the foxes, stopped doing it. Apparently, there was a concern that the foxes were becoming overly dependent on the hand outs. On my last morning at CTIO, I got to see one of the foxes and snapped a few pictures.

Above Photo is the fox with the Blanco 4-meter telescope in the background.

The Above Photos show the first first nibbling on something than turning around, apparently looking at the small telescopes on the Cerro Tololo summit.

Funny thing is as I was dumping the pictures from my camera, Roberta knocked on my door, and I opened it, just in time to see one of the foxes run behind Roberta in my field a view. I pointed it out to her and she was happy the foxes were not completely gone.

Well, after a bit of a bumpy start, this observing run has gone reasonably well. We think we will be able to get the spectra don of several hundred stars, some over 150,000 times fainter than the human eye (in dark skies) can see. We managed to do this in all of our planned fields except one, which we had to drop after the attack of the telescope gremlins mentioned in a previous post.  After that first tramautic night, this has actually become a rather “routine” affair, as we spend 50 minutes at a time on one field, then have to scramble to shoot some calibrations or re-configure the fibers on the spectrograph.

It will take us a good chunk of the summer to know what the results of this run actually are, such is the nature of astronomical data, but all in all, this feels like it has been a very productive run. In addition to the “science objectives” of this trip,  I have seen some of the darkest skies imaginable.  Since my interest in astronomy started by my attempts as a 6 to 7 year old to understand our place in the vastness of that sky, it has also been somewhat fulfilling to the soul to see the Universe in this way, the way humans saw it before the advent of artificial lighting.  Call this Chicken Soup for the Astronomer’s Soul.

That said, I am now ready to go back home to my family who I miss and my students whom I have to guide to finals. Just a few more hours, another short 5 hours of sleep, than I take the carryall to La Serena. Dr. Humphreys, my collaborator, will give a talk there tomorrow afternoon. We’ll do dinner afterward, and then tomorrow, I start the 24 hours of flights and connections it will take to get me home.

One of the neat internal websites you are seeing more and more of at observatories is the use of all-sky cameras to monitor cloud cover. You spend your time in a windowless control room (so as not to let light out) so sometimes you completely miss changes in weather. I downloaded the last roughly 10 hours of video from the all-sky camera here at CTIO and am posting a Flash movie version of it. It starts off with the crescent moon setting (which is bright enough to overwhelm the camera). Then you see the center of the Milky Way galaxy rising in the East, eventually getting very high in the sky.

Since each exposure is 10 seconds, in some frames you see ‘lines’ appear, these are typically airplanes or possibly satellites.

The bright “star” to the East (left) of the Galactic Center in the last few frames is the planet Jupiter. Also in the last few frames you start seeing a glow in the eastern sky, almost pointing toward Jupiter. This is the Zodiacal light, sunlight reflecting off dust particles in the plane of the solar system. You need quite dark skies to see that.

My last observing run at Cerro Tololo, we were observing in “grey” time, when the moon was between 3rd quarter and full. So the dark sky only lasted a few hours. Now we are here during dark time, the days around new moon. Cerro Tololo is a nice, very dark site… perfect for astronomy. There is a bit of light pollution from La Serena and Coquimbo in the east and Vicuña in the north, but the sky is very dark, especially without the moon up. A large part of what makes this site so important to optical astronomy is this darkness, which is a rare commodity in the modern electric light-filled world.

I realize how dark the skies are here every time I go outside now. The Center of the Milky Way is passing overhead and it just screams out at you to be noticed. You can see it clearly on the right side of this picture, shot by Roger Smith of NOAO/AURA/NSF. It shows the 4-meter at Cerro Tololo shot at night. This is what the skies look like here. Admittedly this picture goes a bit deeper than human vision, but I would swear it isn’t much deeper. At home, we can’t see the Milky Way easily, even 15 miles from town, because of the light pollution and the fact that the Galactic Center is very far south. Here, you can’t avoid it! The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two irregular galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, are clearly visible to the human eye (they are on the right side of this picture).

And just a few minutes ago I saw something I have never seen before, Zodiacal Light. I am seeing sunlight reflecting off dust grains in the plane of the Solar System. Something only possible because of these extremely dark skies. Cool!

Last night was quite a misadventure for us. First, we lost the autoguiding computer that keeps the telescope pointed at its target. The able engineers here tackled it for over 2 hours, we finally decided to guide by hand… tedious, but possible. Then the fiber controller on our multifiber spectrograph flaked out. Another 3 hours lost in attempts to remedy that. In a 10 hour night, we only had about 4 hours on sources. Oh, and in the last hour or so, something I hadn’t seen at CTIO during my last run happen, high cirrus clouds came in. Blech.

Tonight is starting off better. The clouds dispersed (mostly). The autoguider is working. And while we lost about 45 minutes to fiber issues, it looks like those may be vanquished as well. Hopefully the telescope gremlins that were working against us last night will be gone tonight. We are on our first 50 minute exposure, so I am going to bang out this post quickly.

Here’s some more pictures I have taken around here during the few hours of daytime I have been awake.

This is the telescope we are using, the 4-meter Blanco telescope on Cerro Tololo. This is a stitched image composed of 6 single frames. Because I was relatively close to the telescope, there is a distortion here similar to a fisheye lens image. To get a sense of scale, notice the double doors to the lower right hand side of the telescope itself.

This is an image of the other telescopes on the peak of Cerro Tololo shot from the catwalk around the 4-meter. From left to right the larger domes contain the 60-inch (1.5 meter), 36-inch (0.9 meter), the Yale 1-meter (which I used in April 2006), and the Michigan Schmidt Telescope. There are a few smaller telescopes in the background. About 50 miles behind the telescopes is the La Silla observatory (not visible in this picture).

There were some clouds here earlier today. This is the view from the peak of Cerro Tololo towards Cerro Pachon, which the rightmost mountain in this image. On its peak you can see (as small dots in the thumbnail) the SOAR telescope on the left and the large Gemini South 8-meter telescope on the right. I love the clouds in the background rolling over clouds, towards Argentina.

This is another 180 degree panorama shot from a bit up the hill from the dormitories. It shows Cerro Tololo on the right and on the left, appearing more distant than it really is, Cerro Pachon. If you squint, you might see the Gemini South 8-meter in this image.

Finally, another 180 degree panorama of the western horizon as seen from my dorm room right around sunset tonight. Those pink clouds, illuminated by the setting sun, are over Argentina. They form over those mountains to the west of us, Cerro Tololo rarely sees puffy clouds like those, it rarely sees clouds (except in the winter), and when it does see clouds, they are high cirrus as shown in the picture above.

Another “panorama” of CTIO, this time a set of 6 photos covering about 75-90 degrees of my field of view of the dome-covered peak of Cerro Tololo as seen from the parking lot near the dormitories. I am using the Blanco 4-meter which is in the far left (largest) dome.

It was beautiful outside when I arrived yesterday, so using my cruddy little Casio Exilim camera, I shot 16 pictures of the view from outside to dormitories near the peak of CTIO. Here’s the panoramic image I stitched together from those 16 images. It’s not nearly as impressive as the real view. It covers about 180 degrees of the horizon. Click on the images for the largee versions.

Here’s a version of the image with some of the features/telescopes labeled (yes, I misspelled dormitories in the image, its not worth fixing it right now).

There is a great article online at Scientific American’s website investigating the claim that Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson might have “cooked” the data from their solar eclipse observations in 1919 in a way that supported Einstein’s (then new) General Theory of Relativity:

On May 29, 1919, two British expeditions, positioned on opposite sides of the planet, aimed telescopes at the sun during a total eclipse. Their mission: to test a radical theory of gravity dreamed up by a former patent clerk, who predicted that passing starlight should bend toward the sun. Their results, announced that November, vaulted Albert Einstein into the public consciousness and confirmed one of the most spectacular experimental successes in the history of science.

In recent decades, however, some science historians have argued that astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, the junior member of the 1919 expedition, believed so strongly in Einstein’s theory of general relativity that he discounted data that clashed with it. [From Fact or Fiction: Did Researchers Cook Data from the First Test of General Relativity?]

The nice thing is this article illustrates one of the less well-appreciated challenges facing the functional scientist: distinguishing between bad data and data that conflicts with your theoretical expectations. Bad data, like other things in life, just happens. And when it happens, it can be a pain to deal with. How do you know when the data is “bad” (that is, the result of a problem at the telescope or a glitch in your software) versus when the data simply conflicts with your theory? In one case, getting rid of the data makes sense. However, being over-eager to reject conflicting data may make you reject a completely compatible alternative interpretation to your observation. Furthermore, if your data seem to support a controversial theory, you should be fairly confident your results are not the result of “bad” data. As Carl Sagan said in Cosmos , “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” You have to be pretty confident you haven’t made a mistake if your data strays far from what you expect. Knowing the difference between “bad” data and data that supports a different theory the human part of the science I try to teach my students about. It is also the reason peer-review is such an incredibly important part of the scientific process.

By the way, the verdict of the article’s author is that Eddington and Dyson did the right thing. It turns out it was actually Dyson, who was initially inclined against Einstein’s theory, who made the decision to toss the bad data out. The final results when published^[1] supported Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which still stands as the most well-supported model for gravitation to this day.

We live in a strange era where some presidential candidates brag about their complete absence of knowledge of science but yet admit science plays such a gigantic role in the possible improvement (or destruction) of society. Given this election climate, the Union of Concerned Scientists is asking the presidential candidates to participate in a debate focused solely on the role of science-related policy in their proposed administrations. And they want them to do it before the presidential primaries in Pennsylvania. The full text of the petition says:

Dear presidential candidate,

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

We would like to hear how, as president, you plan to defend science from political interference, and how you plan to use science to inform your policies.

We call on you to participate in Science Debate 2008 in Philadelphia on April 18. 

If you want to sign it, go to http://ucsaction.org/campaign/2_14_08_science_debate_petition?rk=e7_WrI6qDE76W and sign.

I apparently made the mistake of staying at a Hilton Hotel in Austin, TX for the AAS Meeting last week. Hilton Grand Vacations, a division of Hilton Hotels (no link, they don’t deserve the traffic) has been calling be several times this weekend, abandoning the phone call when they don’t have an operator available fast enough. I know this because the caller ID reported the call was from Orlando, FL, phone number 407-722-3532. I called the number back and they said they were Hilton Grand Vacations and were really willing to set me up on a nice vacation.

Apparently, these idiots don’t realize that calling someone on the National DO NOT Call list, even if you have a “prior business relationship,” is calling someone who has already stated they don’t like Junk Calls. Why they don’t bother to check against the National DO NOT call list before placing telephone solicitations is beyond me. Apparently, a search of 407-722-3532 on Google reveals several people pretty torqued off about the calls.

I informed the nice lady on the other side of the line that

1. they should remove our home phone number from their phone list since I am on the National DO NOT Call list, (they did so without complaint and gave me a reference number to supposedly track the request)
2. They should consider any previous business relationship severed (this is how they get around the National Do Not Call list), and
3. I will be filing a complaint using Form 1088 at the FCC for the series of abandoned calls.

I will hopefully email the AAS to inform them of this completely unprofessional behavior on the part of Hilton. Maybe they will reconsider their relationship with these idiot, I know I have.