Monday 13 December 2010

Remote observing: success!


Well, I shouldn't count my chickens, but tonight is the first night of remote operations at UKIRT where the telescope, instruments, data reduction and all the other things required to take data are being run from Hilo at sea level. A small group of us are at the summit in case anything bad happens which so far hasn't. In fact we're taking real science data when I expected we'd actually be doing engineering tests, so this has gone better than expected and I'm a very relieved head of operations!

In place of our regular summit operator, Pele Mascotte is sitting by the controls, just in case.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations Tom! :)

Alessandra

Anonymous said...

What wonderful news!!!!

love
Pam

PS Pele looks great!

Anonymous said...

I love the pics with the dog! And dude this is interesting! This means what for you? BTW I have a friend that would so like to pick your brain.

Anonymous said...

PS. Let's meet on the HPP cliffs sometime soon.

Anonymous said...

Tom,
Congratulations. I'm glad we had the opportunity to see you at work on the summit.
Chuck

Tom said...

Thanks Chuck, Pam, Blake and Alessandra!

Blake - to answer your question, my job remains the same it's just that I won't be going to the summit much anymore. I suspect for the next few months I'll be busier than ever though and think I'll be fielding more night-time calls than ever before...

Tom