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Goings on at Lick....Hummmm.
First, the road up, Highway 130, is being repaved so expect long delays. Got caught 2 weeks ago and had to sit for 1/2 hour only 3 miles down from the top.
Worse though, ALL the Lick pavement around the domes to the east has been torn up! What a mess. I had to park 1/4 mile away behind Shane 120 and slog through a muddy mess to get to Crocker Dome. The phone lines got cut by the Gorilla's doing the work and currently, the mountain only has partial phone service. The prognosis is that the roads will be that way for another 6 weeks! So I'm going to work with my boots on!
Anyway, astronomical happenings include the publication of my article on Vulcan in the October issue of the SJAA Ephemeris. It's on line and will be hardcopy mailed soon. Comments or questions always welcome.
Had a Vulcan session Thursday the 16th but before going there, my boss wanted me to stop by NASA AMES to pick up some equipment for Vulcan. Well while there, I finally got to meet our Vulcan Imaging Team expert Doug Caldwell. So me being very interested in how exactly the Vulcan images are processed, spent almost 2 hours with him learning some of the details.
Basically, the image data disks are loaded, the star field is examined and several alignment stars are selected. Then brightness data is selected from the field. The star field contains some 50,000 stars (we have a 7 degree field) and approximately 8,000 stars are used for the data. Next, the data is extracted for all of a nights image sets, 40 to 60 images, then a tabular brightness table for each star is built. The table is the depth of the nights data, somewhere between 40 to 60 points. So there is this big matrix 40 to 60 deep by 8,000 across. After that, Doug then corrects each of the 8000 stars for flat, bias and dark CCD errors. Then the corrected data is compared with data from other nights viewing. After going through a noise reduction routine and some binning, then he is able to see the brightness changes. Stars with good signatures are then plotted, marked and targeted for visual confirmation at Keck. So far we have about 60 candidates and have verified 2 in the Cygnus field with Keck. Unfortunately, these stars turned out to be two never before seen very close eclipsing binaries - even though they weren't planets, it was interesting and very exciting to NASA. They gave us more funding as the result of this finding!
More tales from the Shane Control room. Last Thursday was very interesting as Professor Filippenko from UC Berkley was there with a group of his graduate students. So I sat in for a few minutes. They were studying supernova and during his discussion, mentioned "Olbers paradox". Olbers paradox is an attempt to answer the question "Why is the Sky Dark?" and it really piqued my interest. I found an excellent explanation of Olbers paradox on the web and provided a except below if you care to read it.
Saturday's session at Vulcan was a rough one. The weather was terrible! High thin scattered clouds just made imaging almost impossible. I only got one good run of 10 images the whole night! Shane was having an equally difficult time. An astronomer from UCLA was trying to do Quasar work and he finally gave up. So the weather got us all. Maybe this weekend will be better.