The Blog

   At the top of the tower lies a sleeping telescope...

Okay, I'm finally feeling awake enough to post, so here we go. I'll start with an apology: I didn't bring my camera card reader, so I haven't got any new photos to show you, but I'll put some up on flickr later on, but for the moment I'm just going to write until I can't think of anything else to say.

So, as mentioned before, I'm up at Narrabri, in North-Western NSW. I'm listening to a weird radio station that is playing a curious country mix of a Madonna song and where they spend most of their time talking about the races, I can see about 100 kangaroos and a similar number of sheep within walking distance, and of course there are the telescopes, four of which are within my field of view at present.

So, briefly, ATCA is a set of six telescopes, five of which can be moved back and forth along a very wide railway line, and the sixth is a couple of kilometers down the road. By using so many telescopes looking at the one object, we can use some mathematical tricks and pretend that we have a much bigger telescope. This is called synthesis imaging, because we're synthesising having a huge dish. So, what we do is we cycle through a bunch of about 15 objects, looking at them for about 5 minutes each over a total period of time that is about 14 hours today and 10 hours tomorrow. I'm not going to go into detail here (we have wikipedia for that) but once we get back to Sydney Ivan has a huge job putting all the data together and seeing what pretty pictures there are to see in it all.

We're looking at planetary nebulae, which are the shells old dying stars that were once like our sun. They don't have planets, the name comes from the fact that the first ones found looked like green-blue balls, like Uranus and Neptune. Since then we've found a bunch of different weird shapes, but the name stuck because it's a nifty name. Anyway, I'm actually not sure of the finer details of which project this is for (other than Ivan's PhD), but anyway, the telescopes have been going strong since 6am this morning when we took over, and today has been a lot of fun.

The big problem I have with these observing trips is the fact that I have nothing to do on the first day. The first day is set aside for setting up all the schedule files for driving the telescope, and usually it's a one-person job. But I'm obligated to sit around and work on my own stuff while they do that just in case they need help that I can provide. So yesterday I was in a foul mood because I was sitting around doing nothing (okay, I worked a bit on my PhD, but not much because I couldn't get into it because it's rather boring at the moment). And while I can offer to help until I'm blue in the face, they don't need me.

But today, I get to sit in the control room, and occasionally chat to Ivan, and drive the telescope, and feel like my presence here is actually necessary. I'm sure that later, when they ask me to do a 4am-12pm shift tomorrow morning, I'll hate the lot of them again, but for the moment I'm enjoying this trip.

Today I actually got to speak with the two Japanese people who have been using one of the other telescopes (Mopra, for those in the know). They are completely awesome and adventurous, and together with the duty astronomer we set off on bikes to explore the old National Measurement Laboratory, which was a solar observatory that was in use for a long time from the 60s or so up until about 15 years ago, when the money ran out and they didn't even have enough left to pack everything up and put it in storage, so the telescopes are still there, and the motors are still able to open up the roofs to show us the sunlight. Now, since I have no photos to show at present, I will just tell you that these buildings are awesome. They look like your stereotypical american mailbox (half a cylinder on top of a box), and they split down the middle with the curved roof opening and curving underneath the platform that you are standing on. It's beautiful.

We visited two of these towers, though we only opened one because the boss could see the other from her house just down the road and we weren't technically meant to be there... *grins* The telescopes are still there, mainly because they're huge, and one looks like a death ray for a mecha! I'm not sure that I was able to convey that in my photographs, but seriously, this thing was awesome! We had to tread lightly as we walked around, because the wooden floors weren't necessarily safe, and we had to watch out for the birds who nest there and had pooped on everything. But all the old machinery was there, and it was just amazing to see all this stuff.

We also saw a current solar observatory, belonging to the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), which was merrily chugging along in a modern little dome. That one is completely automated, and no one ever seems to visit it.

For Beto, I haven't see any spiders or snakes yet, but I'm sure they're lurking somewhere in the background. I'll be disappointed if I make it through the entire weekend without seeing any, even though I really don't want to.

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