Monday 8 December 2008

Prospects poor, nice sunset

The first night of our planned instrument engineering/commissioning is not going to go well I feel. The sky was covered with thick cirrus on the drive to the summit and the satellite images are showing even thicker clouds on the way. There is some closed-dome testing we can do but it will be a short night. We're currently trying to acquire a 5th magnitude star which should literally be burning a hole in the detector's array, but we can hardly see it.

The sunset was beautiful although I didn't have much time to take photos this evening.

5 comments:

Beep said...

Sorry the clouds are standing in the way of science :| But what a wonderful sunset...thank you for sharing it.

Zuzana said...

It must be magical to be an astronomer; I think I've picked the wrong carrier field.;))

Diane said...

Hope it went better than you expected :)

Tom said...

The night was wiped out in terms of weather but we did get a lot of engineering type things done which was useful. The sunsets are always worth seeing, the sunrises are even better! They still don't make up for 14-hour shifts with little oxygen!

Keera Ann Fox said...

Oh, that has got to be one of the loveliest photos of a sunset ever! And a lovely sunset! *drools*