Gobsmacked

Lou Minatti is a long-time online friend and excellent blogger. This evening he posted a photograph from Wally Pacholka. I do not have enough words to describe how beautiful this image of the Milky Way is. I'm speechless.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star

How I wonder how many of you little buggers are out there? Poetry was never my strong suit.

After recovering from the shock of opening my 401K statement yesterday I thought it might be better for my health to think about astronomy again and try to forget about the dire financial news on this planet. So...

Although there have been several surveys of the astronomical sky in the past we're entering a new era in astronomy fuelled by the incredible increases in the processing power of computers. At least three telescopes on Mauna Kea are undertaking sky surveys or are about to and one of these is the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS), an ambitious attempt to map the northern hemisphere sky in the near-infrared (light with wavelengths of roughly 0.8 to 2.3 microns) .

The survey itself consists of five sub-surveys, the Large Area Survey (LAS), the Galactic Plane Survey (GPS), the Galactic Clusters Survey (GCS), the Deep Extragalactic Survey (DXS) and the Ultradeep Survey (UDS). Although all these surveys use the same telescope and instrument (UKIRT and WFCAM respectively), their aims are very different. The main difference between them though, in lay person's terms, are the parts of the sky they cover and how deep the images go and therefore the science we learn. For instance, the LAS is a project to map a large part of the northern hemisphere but not as deep, for instance, as the UDS which images a part of the sky only slightly larger than the apparent size of the full moon, but spends almost a year doing so. These images will be added together to create infrared images of the early universe.

As a very young child my interest in the physical sciences was given to me by my father (a meteorologist) although I never actually thought astronomy would be my career - that came a lot later. Every week I'd sit with him and watch Star Trek and then I'd look at the astronomy picture books I had been given by my parents and neighbours. The images that always held my attention were those of stars in nebulae with all those amazing colours. I used to imagine that there were planets around those stars with populations that would visit each other in their space ships.

What I couldn't imagine then was how far we would advance and produce images that now blow my mind. I still love images of nebulae, they always make me pause for thought, and my favourite survey for this is the UKIDSS GPS. They've released some of their images to the public (e.g., the picture above is the GPS image of our Galactic Centre) and you can get a glimpse of our Galaxy in the near-infrared for yourself at the GPS WFCAM Science Archive page.

And before you ask, no, I'm not a fan of Star Trek!

Black holes

A few weeks ago the news was all about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the highest energy particle collider ever built, and whether the world would end or not in a mad-scientist's attempt to recreate the Big Bang and have us all sucked into a black hole. Or, as the scientists would say, we would learn some new physics.

The mad-bankers have since become jealous and are currently doing their best to end the world themselves. Blessed are the poor financial experts, they know not what they do.

The LHC is broken and never even got to the stage of colliding protons, but it will do next year. Hopefully. That's enough time to schedule the rest of us to put the sub-prime mortgage lenders in the beam, handcuffed and blindfolded, and let them see what the end of the world looks like. As an experimentalist, I would like to see what happens.

Hotel Mauna Kea

I'm off for another sleep-deprived stay at Vacation Resort Hale Pohaku although this will be a relatively short stay, at least I hope so. I thought anyone reading this might be interested to watch the following very well made video on youtube which provides a sample of life on the mountain for a group of extremely talented astronomer-musicians.

Hotel Mauna Kea

I happened to be on the mountain when this video was made. It was the first time I've ever sat down for breakfast and dinner at HP with live guitar music, it definitely felt a little different!

The Mercury is rising

Despite the somewhat depressing times everyone is experiencing right now we're still making some fantastic scientific discoveries. The NASA MESSENGER probe has taken some stunning images of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun and definitely one of the least understood planets in the solar system.

Mercury is a mystery but is also one of the keys to confirming Einstein's theory of relativity. Its odd orbit wasn't understood until general relativity explained it. A high five to Albert.

OK, so it looks a bit like the Moon. I guess it does. This planet hasn't been imaged for decades though, at least not this close, and scientists are going to learn quite a lot about our solar system from this mission. I'm no planetary scientist but can't help thinking that Mercury took quite a smack from something large in its youth, just look at the northern polar region. In fact several groups think a giant impact is what created Mercury in the first place (just like our moon), but the scar from that wouldn't be visible on the planet, so am looking forward to finding out exactly what the experts think.

This is an amazing time in planetary science, both NASA and ESA are making tremendous discoveries about our solar system and nearest planets. Water is confirmed on Mars and who knows, maybe we'll find out if life existed there or, heavens above, might still be there.

And all this costs poodle piss compared to the money lost by Wall Street.

(Picture credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

The second presidential debate

I really wanted to avoid talking about politics in my blog but it seems that I'm compelled to post something every time there's a debate! So I won't mention any politics this time or give my opinion on the candidates, but instead mention how disappointed I am with the forum, again.

I'm watching the debate right now being replayed on local TV because, of course, there's quite a time-difference between here and the mainland so missed the actual live debate. This is the so-called town hall debate and my impression was that the audience would play more of a role. Oh well, this is a feeling I know well, but - Wrong Again. OK, some of the audience were given an opportunity to ask a question, but I feel dissatisfied. There were too many questions and not enough time to debate the answers.

Having such a debate is a great idea and giving the candidates about two minutes to introduce their position works well, but how about limiting the questions to a few of the most important ones and then allowing more time for actual debate? Perhaps even an opportunity for the audience member asking the original question to ask something or make their own point as a follow-up?

For anyone reading this blog with knowledge of this debating system, could you tell me what rules to expect in the final presidential debate? I hope Obama and McCain are allowed more time to argue their points, and I really mean argue, and that the audience can participate more. I just feel a bit let down right now.

Queuing up

In the old days, life as an astronomer was wonderful as long as you enjoyed travelling. Every six months or so you'd write science cases for obtaining observing time at various telescopes around the world and if the various peer-review panels accepted your proposal, off you'd go to the telescope to carry out your project. As a student and subsequent post-doc I was fortunate enough to visit the US (including Hawai`i), Australia and South Africa to use various telescopes.

Although this still happens many observatories are switching to a new mode which is far more efficient. I just happen to work at one which took the lead in this new method - queue observing.

The old "classical" scheduled runs worked well because you were at the telescope and essentially controlled your experiment, but if your run happened to coincide with a period of poor weather or serious technical problems then you were almost certainly screwed.

The new mode is called "queue scheduling" or "flexible scheduling". Briefly, once the time allocation panel approves a proposal for telescope time the astronomer prepares his or her programme using software supplied by the observatory and then submits it to a database, or the "queue". At night, these programmes are pulled out of the queue and run. The astronomer then receives their data via the internet.

The advantages are numerous. The various science project in the queue will more often than not have particular weather-based requirements. For instance the seeing needs to be good in order increase sensitivity or detect small detail in images or the observations require dry atmospheric conditions. Alternatively some observations can be done in bad weather because sensitivity or stable conditions are not so important. Which observations are done on a particular night are then driven by the weather and we no longer have nights wasted because of inflexibility. The database also allows those projects which are rated highly on a scientific basis to be put at the top of the queue and so are given the best chance of being completed.

This has reduced the need for astronomers to travel to observatories. Some love this, others don't! It hasn't completely removed the need for visiting observers though and we still receive many of them. For the more technically challenging projects or highest rated projects astronomers still visit and their project is given priority while they're observing. They still get to carry out their experiment but while conditions are not suitable for their project they carry out observations from the queue for others. When visiting observers aren't present then of course the observatory staff do the observing.

It's a win-win situation as far as I can see. Money is saved, the best projects are almost certain of being completed, we can still train visiting students and the highest quality data are almost certainly guaranteed for those that need that.

If I were still in the UK though I might think differently as I adored travelling, I still do in fact! Well, I guess it would have forced me to write better proposals!

(Picture credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bus_Queue.jpg)

The day after...

...a meltdown at the summit when the server went down and broke everything: telescope, instruments, sanity, but unfortunately not the phone system as well.

Several people were called. This was 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Some of us are used to this though but it's never pleasant.

Today I planned to watch a bit of football (the American kind) but found myself at work instead. We're back in business again otherwise I wouldn't be writing this, but needed a bit of a distraction this evening because I was annoyed and frustrated. So I visited Borders on the way home and bought the 4th season of Boston Legal.

I'm a bit of a BBC fan as I love British television and (usually) hate American TV. Well, tonight I've laughed as I haven't done for a long time and actually cried as well, all within 30 minutes. I can't say enough good things about Boston Legal apart from it's the most intelligent and funny series I've seen in years. It's a shame season 5 will be its last and will buy that season the next time my weekend is destroyed - well, as soon as the series is finished and the DVD is available.

What was the question again?

Another brief sortie into politics: the US vice presidential debate today was not what I expected.

I like the idea of these debates but don't like the fact that the audience cannot participate. What I disliked even more about this particular debate was the moderator's almost machine-gun-like questions. There seemed to be little time for the candidates to answer questions without having to ensure that their sound-bites were there for the press and not much more. Fewer questions with an opportunity to encourage the candidates to provide more in-depth answers would have been my choice, but I don't have a say and may well be in the minority anyway. It was interesting nevertheless.

Voting eludes me in the upcoming election, I'm not yet a US citizen. Hopefully I can have a say in the next election and when that happens I know I'll be listening to the debates with even more interest. The candidate for whom I'll vote is something I will decide then, but what I'll be hoping for is someone who actually answers the questions. During this debate I think Biden actually addressed most of the questions pertinently whilst Palin often tried to steer the debate to the areas that she felt she could score points even if they were utterly irrelevant to the question asked. My perception was that those areas were very limited.

Update (21:50 HST): The debate was shown again here this evening and it confirmed something I thought I might have misheard from Palin.

"It's a toxic mess, really, on Main Street that's affecting Wall Street."

I felt insulted when I first heard it, now that I've heard it again I'm more insulted. This is why I think there should be audience participation because I doubt that's what she meant and it would have been relatively easy for someone to question her about this comment. Without that opportunity though, I now feel as if she blames someone like me, an average tax payer, for the Wall Street meltdown. I had nothing to do with it your honour.

For those who might not know, I'm not a US citizen but pay taxes to the US government just like any other US worker. I just don't have any representation. I can live with that for now.

I mustn't forget

It should be drummed into me by now but I never remember, perhaps because I'm either on the mountain, at work in Hilo in a relatively sound-proof building or at home, my ear-drums being destroyed by the infestation of coqui frogs. Or perhaps I'm just getting older. Yesterday, however, I took an early lunch break and was walking right under one of the Hawai`i Civil Defense sirens when it went off. Boy, did my heart miss a couple of beats or what? Those things are loud.

What I'd forgotten, again, is that on the first weekday of every month the sirens are tested along with the early warning system for broadcast media. The sirens are used to warn people of an emergency such as a hurricane, but everyone here is more familiar with their use to warn of a tsunami.

Everyone remembers the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that killed hundreds of thousands of people; perhaps fewer remember the tsunamis that killed more people in Hawai`i in the 20th century than all the other Hawai`ian natural disasters and that concerns me. The population on this island has increased by an incredible amount in the last few years and people are building houses right on the coastline. Many of these families are from the mainland and might not be as aware of the tsunami threat as the locals, but even people that have lived here all their lives may not have experienced a large tsunami as the last big one was nearly 50 years ago.

Hawai`i is quite unique when it comes to the threat as it lies in the centre of the "Ring of Fire" and is subject to tsunamis generated from anywhere in the Pacific. Fortunately there is now a rather sophisticated early warning system but it will do little to help if the tsunami is generated locally. In that case we'll have only minutes to react.

The picture above (credit: NOAA) is of the first waves crashing into Hilo harbor during the 1946 event. The arrow points to a man who didn't survive. This will happen again one day, I just hope people living here realise that.