Take A Telescopic Tour

Here's a nice little video featuring one of the radio telescopes it's my job to watch over:

There's Always A Relevant xkcd

This is what I do for a living, only without the dogs:

Yeah, Science!

Of course, April 22 was not just Earth Day, it was also the day of the March for Science. I gather there were some activities going on for this where I live, and I have to say, even that though I am chronic non-joiner and find it extremely difficult to get off my butt even for things I strongly believe in, marching for science is something I might have made an exception for if I weren't working today. (You know, doing science.) As it is, in a vague gesture of solidarity, I wore my shirt with the Neil DeGrasse Tyson quote: "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

CNN has some pictures of amusing sciencey signs. I particularly like the one that says, "What do we want? Evidence based research! When do we want it? After peer review."

Space Stuff

Also an eensy bit belated, but hearty congratulations to the Juno team, who are all set now to do some really awesome science at Jupiter. Let us know if you find any monoliths, guys!

Three Things Make A Post

Because I haven't been updating much lately, and I should post something:

1. I spent this morning resealing the gutters on my house. Well, the ones in the front. The ones in the back of the house still need to be done, but I think I about reached the limit of how much of that job I'm willing to do in one day. Scraping off the old stuff is tedious, and the silicone sealant I bought turns out to be way worse to work with than the caulk I used in the bathroom, especially when you're holding the caulk gun upside-down and at odd angles. As a result, my gutters are now kind of a goopy, silicone-y mess. Sigh. Well, at least it's clear, so maybe it won't be too obvious? Honestly, I'm not sure I care much, as long as it's watertight. Man, I really hope it's watertight. Of course, I won't be able to test it until it dries.

This has been yet another installment of Ways It Sucks to Be an Adult. Hey, when you're a kid, if you have to do a big, annoying chore like that, at least you'll probably get a word of praise and maybe a little extra allowance. As an adult, all you get is the dull, practical outcome of not having leaking gutters, if you're lucky, and the responsibility of being the one to do it over, if you're not.

2. A not-good-news update on Nova-kitty: He's continuing to lose weight. The vet now thinks it is very likely due to heart problems. (I hadn't realized heart disease could cause weight loss, but it turns out it totally can. You learn something new every day.) He can't say for sure, though, because he doesn't have the equipment to do a proper echocardiogram, and I'd have to see a specialist for that. Which... At Nova's age, honestly, the stress of diagnosing and treating the problem might not be worth the small amount of extra time they might be able to buy him. For one thing, seeing a specialist would almost certainly mean a long, long car trip into the city -- probably more than one -- and he freaks out terribly just on the ten-minute ride to the local vet. Not long ago, he got so agitated about it, he peed all over himself in the carrier on the way. It's not a happy thing to do to the poor animal.

For right now, at least, we've switched him from the slightly-higher-calorie-than-his-previous-food cat food to special extra-high-calorie canned cat food, in hopes of curbing the weight loss some. The good news is, he loves the stuff, and can't seem to get enough of it. The bad news is, it's given him diarrhea. I'm really, really hoping that'll go away as he adjusts to the new stuff. Well, hey, at least it meant I didn't have to give him his laxative last night.

3. On a happier (and more science-y) note, I thought I'd link to this blog post celebrating NASA's Swift satellite observing its 1,000th gamma ray burst. This is relevant to my life because the VLBA is one of the "telescopes around the planet, which then (if they can) also observe the burst," as mentioned in the article. Most of the time, we're busy observing something else, but sometimes these things happen at just the right time for us to participate, and I'm always slightly tickled by the fact that I'm essentially being e-mailed by a satellite.

Some Of Us Go Around The Sun, Some Go Outward Away From It.

I am 44 years old today, which, as far as I can tell, may actually be about the age where you stop caring much about how old you are.

I would, however, like to thank NASA for the awesome Pluto mission they got me, even if it's not going to be fully unwrapped until tomorrow.

Telescopes Vs. Robots

Your random link for today: "The Roomba for Lawns Is Really Pissing Off Astronomers".

Well, It's Nice To Be Missed. But It Sucks To Be Gone.

The shutdown of NRAO seems to be getting noticed, at least by the science press. Here's a blog post from The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla with links to some articles.

Geeky As It Is, I'm Probably Not The First Person To Make This Joke. But..

I sometimes feel like my life is one long demonstration of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: when I have the time, I don't have the energy, and when I have the energy, I don't have the time.

(And, yes, that is also going to be my excuse for not blogging more lately.)

More Awesomeness From Mars

Ten minutes after I finished answering the comments on the last post, I saw this. Yes, that's a picture of Curiosity parachuting down towards the Martian surface, as taken from orbit. Wow.

Forget The Olympics. This Is Exciting!

Congratulations to the Curiosity Mars rover, and to all who worked on her! I watched the landing live on NASA TV (along with about 200,000 other people), and it looks like it went absolutely flawlessly. The jubilation in the control room was utterly infectious.

Appropriately, Cracked just posted a pretty cool piece on 5 reasons you should be excited about Mars today, which I couldn't not link to.

And, in case you haven't seen it yet, here's JPL's "7 minutes of terror" video describing Curiosity's crazyawesome landing procedure. It's impossible not to marvel at the fact that we can actually make something like this work. Go, human technology! Go, humans!

Astronomy vs. Stir Fry

There is nothing that makes you appreciate the vast interconnectedness of all things quite so much as working a job where the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy deciding to burp can lead directly to your dinner getting cold.

Well, They Are Calling It "Most Peculiar" On The Paperwork.

Oh, hey, so this is what we're observing tonight. Very, very cool!

I Heart Outer Space

I have to say, I am not a huge fan of Valentine's Day. But I am in love with the cosmos, so I will link to this: Happy cosmic Valentine’s Day!. Aww! The universe is full of love! Or at least full of random things that look like other things.

I Am A Hamster.

I think that from now on, I am going to link to this article as my excuse for every brain fart or moment of stupidity I have.

Welcome to Socorro!

So, of course I had to link to this PhD comic after finding a copy of it in my inbox. (Thanks, Captain C!)

I do wish to point out that 1) The VLA is actually about an hour west of Socorro, not in the town itself, 2) the movie theater (with its one whole screen) did eventually re-open, but the rest of the description of Socorro is pretty accurate, and 3) that last panel is so true it hurts.

A Rare, Brief, Work-Related Comment

Aha! This is why we've been so darned busy lately!

That Light In The Sky Is A Place That We've Been.

Now here is an awesome way to mark the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11: taking pictures of the Apollo landing sites from orbit. Check out the Apollo 14 pic, in particular, where you can actually see the trail left by the astronauts' footprints. Wow.

While I'm At It, Happy Anniversary, Crab Nebula!

Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans!

Also, here's an interesting trivia fact from my astronomy wall calendar: the Earth is at aphelion today, meaning it is now at its farthest point from the sun: 152.1 million kilometers.

Only now I'm wondering if it's somehow unpatriotic to use the metric system on Independence Day. Y'know, that's one area in which I wish we were a little less independent.

Just Dishy

Got to do a fairly cool road trip at work today. (Tiring, though. Working until midnight and then hitting the road at 9:00 AM is not exactly an ideal schedule, especially when you've been having a sleep deprived week already.) We drove out to Pie Town, NM (which is about as close to Middle of Nowhere, American West as one might ever wish to get) to visit the VLBA's nearest radio telescope site. I'd actually been out there a couple of times before, many years ago, but my job didn't involve interacting with the antennas at all then, so it was a worthwhile exercise to do it again now that I can put names and functions to the various components. It really doesn't hurt to have an idea of the physical locations of the stuff you have to get people to go out and fix. Plus, crawling around on the antenna is always fun. And, look, I took some pictures!

Here's me sitting on the dish, in closeup:



And in a longer shot:



This one is looking up at the dish:



And because you really ought to have a full-length view of the thing and I didn't get one today, here's one taken the last time I was there, on a much grayer day:



Yay, astronomy!