Chicago roadtrip

One of my friends from Vanderbilt is spending some time at the University of Chicago building some laser experiment at Fermilab. She invited me and another friend (Trey Mack) to come and visit her in Chicago a while back and we started making plans to go up there some time in November.

So I just got back from a roadtrip to Chicago and let me just say that it was awesome. I'll break it down by day below:

Friday 4 November 2011


We left Nashville at about 11am on Friday morning. The roadtrip wasn't the most scenic, but for me that had never done that kind of thing in The States it was fun just seeing the differences in the states we crossed. We took the I65 North Interstate and that took us almost all the way to Chicago, a full 8 hours later. We passed Louisville (Kentucky) and Indianapolis (Indiana) on the way up to Chicago.

Indianapolis

Between Indianapolis and Chicago there is a few miles that is just covered with Wind Turbines to generate electricity. As far as the eye can see it's just wind turbines. Literally hundreds of them.

When we finally reached Chicago it was already dark and I didn't really get to see the city skyline all that well, it was a little cloudy and foggy.

We met Brittany close to the University and went straight to a university play called "The Physicist".

Not a bad play, but not the best. I've seen better productions from high school students. Some parts were really well acted, some parts were poorly acted. But a fun event none the less.

After this we just went back to Brittany's apartment. We met her roommates and just hung out, drank some beer and ate some pizza. We formulated the plan for the next day and went to sleep.

Saturday 5 November 2011

Downtown Chicago

The plan was to leave at around 9am to go explore the city, but Trey and Brittany slept a little later than expected.  I went exploring for a little while Brittany took her morning run and got my first view of downtown Chicago. We eventually left the apartment at 11am. (I was really annoyed at that point as I wanted to get as much Chicago time as possible). Took the bus to downtown and  got off at the beginning of Millenium Park. We walked through the entire park and took lots of awesome photos of the strange artwork. We reached the top of the park where the "Cloud Gate" is located. It's just a giant shiny bean with a fancy name. But really cool to take photos of. When walking underneath the bean the internal reflections are really awesome.

The Giant Bean (aka Cloud Gate)

We decided to get some "breakfast" as it was close to 1pm already (breakfast is the first meal of the day people). So we headed to a place called the "Bongo Room" that serves breakfast until 2pm (the place is only open from 8am to 2pm). Got there at about 2:04pm :( Closed. So we went slightly further down the road to a place called Eleven City Diner. I had some Belgian Waffles at 3pm for breakfast. Freaking Amazing.

Eleven City Diner Belgian Waffles

The rest of the afternoon (or early evening I should say) we spent walking up and down the city and just staring up at the buildings.

Amazing city skyscrapers

We decided to get some food at around 7pm and Trey suggested we go to Portillo's Hot Dogs. Really good hot dogs and the fries were even better.

For evening entertainment we went to a Blues Club called Kingston Mines. We were very lucky to see some really good blues. One stage we had Joanna Connor, and on the other we had Magic Slim & the Teardrops. WOW, just wow. There is nothing more to say. Magic Slim was amazing. The video I linked to above doesn't do him justice.

We finally left the bar at about 1am and headed back home. Sleep was in order after a really full day (just BTW, the traveling around Chicago on the elevated rapid transit system is really cool. Much better than an underground in my opinion. When traveling around the city you get to see everything.)

Sunday 6 November 2011

Cityscape Chicago

I got up really early, not wanting to waste another morning waiting around for Trey and Brittany. I left the apartment at about 8am and headed into downtown to do some exploring on my own. I walked many miles up and down the city streets looking at all the buildings. Chicago is a really big city. You feel really small when you walk in the streets between buildings. I just took some random walk and was surprised to see how many other people were doing the same thing as me :) Tourists.

I eventually met up with Trey, Brittany and Kartik (one of Brittany's friends) for "breakfast" at the Eleven City Diner. The food was so good the day before we decided to eat there again. We wanted to go to Bongo Room, but the wait for a table was like 2 hours. Who stands outside a restaurant for 2 hours for food? Not us.

Osaka Garden

After "breakfast" we made our way to Lake Michigan. It looks more like an ocean than a lake. It's impossible to see the other end of the lake and there are even waves. Not very big waves, but waves none the less. I took off my shoes and dipped my toes into Lake Michigan (the water was "bust a nut" cold). We wanted to go to the Museum of Science and Industry, but we got there late once again and only had an hour left before closing time and we weren't going to spend $24 each to walk around for only an hour. It worked out for the best though as getting to see the city is better than spending all your time indoors looking at some old stuff. On the way back to Brittany's place we took a tour through the Osaka Garden (Japanese Zen Garden). It was really peaceful and it was amazing how calm and quiet it is in this garden.

Obama eats peaches

For dinner, me, Brittany and Kartik, headed north of downtown to DMK Burger Bar. Simply amazing once again. Of all the things that I will remember about Chicago, the food is top of the list. Every place we went to had amazing food. And best of all is that it wasn't that much more than your average fast food place. None of these places are fast food joints, by the way. And to end the evening we headed back to Kingston Mines just to chill out and listen to some amazing blues. It happened to be open mic night and we got to see some really good blues players. Nobody in the same league as Magic Slim though, but a high school boy with his harmonica got pretty damn close. Just as we were about to leave again, Magic Slim (who happens to own Kingston Mines) played us out. We got to stand a few feet away from the legend himself and listen to the best music of the entire weekend. I snapped a picture of a poster in some fruit market's window. It made me chuckle.

Back at Brit's place at around 1:30am and straight to bed. Another long and successful day.

Monday 7 November 2011

I got up slightly later than I would have liked. We eventually left  the apartment at about 11am and I walked with Brittany to her lab on University of Chicago campus. She showed me around for a while before I headed back to meet Trey at Starbucks. We got back on the road and headed back to Nashville. Another 8 or so hours later and I was back, sleeping in "my own bed" and not a couch.

All in all, it was a great trip. Too short to really get a feeling for the city, but I loved it.

Boston is still my favourite US city at the moment, but maybe if I spent more time in Chicago I might be persuaded.

Have a good one y'all

Pumpkin Carving

I just got back from one of Josh's friends house. We were having a "Fall Festival" and did everything that you're supposed to do during fall. We drank so many different kinds of pumpkin beer, watched some college football, drank some peach infused vodka, carved some pumpkins and generally had a really good time.
I really love Boston, everything just makes we want to stay here.

Boston University Talk

So I did my KELT talk at BU on Wednesday and it went really well. Not many grad students in the audience, but having a lot of factulty there was good. Everyone seemed to be really engaged and afterwards the organizer said that I did  a really good job.

This was sent from my phone

Presentations

So the KELT team has gone for the shotgun approach to making KELT visible to the Boston astronomers. Today Josh had a talk at MIT, Rob did a talk at CfA and tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at Boston University.

Most of today was spent making the slides for my presentation tomorrow. I also went with Rob to CfA today.

I'll let you know how the presentation goes tomorrow.

Weekend sightseeing !!!

Hey everyone

WOW, what an awesome weekend. Saturday and Sunday was the first time I really had time to explore the city of Boston, and what an amazing city. I spent the entire day just walking up and down the streets and doing the "touristy" things. Some of the highlights include:
- Taking a "self-guided audio tour" of the Boston Gardens and Boston Common.
- Watching a car being blown up into the air during a movie shoot, Ryan Reynolds was around too.
- Seeing the graves of Paul Revere, John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin.
- Checking out Paul Revere's House.
- Seeing the USS Constitution (old sailing ship).
- Taking a "Old Town Boston Trolley" tour.
- Meeting some South Africans.
- Drinking a beer at some old pub with some Welshmen and Irishmen.
- Doing the "Freedom Trail" walk all around Boston and seeing where The American Revolution really started.


I must have walked close to 15 miles on Saturday. I was really enjoying my free time. I loved how "alive" city was. There were so many people out and about.  Monday was "Columbus Day" and Massachusetts that is a public holiday (another thing that is really weird about America is that not all states take the same public holidays off), hence the reason for so many "tourists".

I finally got back to my hotel room at around 11pm after spending more than 14 hours in the city just walking around. I wanted to sleep, but I was too excited for the South Africa vs Australia rugby game, that I managed to watch online (thanks Jane). Let's not go into too much detail on that though :(

After the rugby I managed to watch Sebastian Vettel win the drivers championship in F1.

And that brings us to Sunday.

Slept slightly later than I normally would have (seeing as I only got to bed at 5am). I walked up and down the Charles River mostly on Sunday, seeing people doing all the fun activities that this city has on offer. There are parks next to the river all the way and people were just sitting around enjoying the wonderful weather and just hanging out. I got some really nice pics of the sunset on the Charles and some amazing shots of Boston at night.

I really love Boston. I could see myself living here some day, maybe for a post-doc or something.

Have a good one.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Yesterday we took a walk over to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to meet with Dave Charbonneau and his students. We gave a little presentation about the KELT project and got some really nice input from them on what we could do to help speed up the "planet finding" thing. Seems like a really good place to be, many really famous names appeared on the doors as I was walking down the corridors.

One of the things that Dave mentioned that we might want to look into is see if we can find all the lightcurves for the known RV planets in our dataset and see what happens when we fold out data on the periods reported by the RV detections. We had a look, and it turns out that there are only 5 objects in the entire list worth looking at. So Rob and I looked at the first one yesterday and the star is almost saturated for us. We will have a look at more today.

We finished off the day yesterday by watching a movie in my room and eating an enormous amount of food. We had some chicken popcorn (small party serving size), 2 pizza's and some doughy delicious dessert. We watched X-Man First Class.

Not a bad night, and a really good day yesterday. Meeting some of the heavyweights in exoplanet science is always good.

Have a good one.

Boston Baby !!

So we left Nashville on Sunday and traveled to Boston. Some delayed flights later (and a single serving friend that had taught English in Namibia), we arrived at the hotel in Boston fairly late. We just got checked in before we headed down to the Japanese restaurant in the hotel for some dinner. It's one of those places where the chef makes the food right in front of you. Very cool.

Yesterday was the first day at the new office, at MIT. Spent a large amount of time just settling in and getting to know everyone. We had a meeting with Joshua Winn, Sarah Seagar and all their students, and just told them a little about KELT and what we hope to get from this project.

Some of the work I did yesterday included looking up some EB's in the ASAS catalog and comparing the KELT lightcurves to the ASAS lightcurves. I emailed the results to Derck Smits to show him the kinds of things we are able to do with KELT. I also let him know that we are finding things that are not in the ASAS catalogs. I also noticed that the Tycho2 catalog V magnitude for KELT objects and NOMAD catalog for the same objects don't agree on the V magnitudes. I'm trying to find out by how much they actually differ and where the difference is coming from.

Dinner last night was at a place called the "Miracle of Sciene" and consisted of a cheeseburger and fries. We got some ice cream from a place just around the corner and headed back to the hotel on foot.

Good first day at MIT

PS. Happy B'day Mom

Dr Pepper's Birthday

Yesterday was Dr Pepper's Birthday. We had some pizza and awesome snacks at his place with a group of his friends. Had a really good time, met some new friends, Franco Scaramuzza and his wife Erica, Julia, and some of the old faces were there too. Hiatt, Dillon, Colby and Christine and Joe (and Rob was there too). Had some really good laughs, mostly when Hiatt was delivering one of his amazing stories. Pizza was awesome, cake was out of this world and "smores" are never a bad idea in the fall :)

Photometric Calibrations

So I've decided to create a small log of what I do every day at the office ... in the hopes that it will motivate me to keep on working.

So yesterday I spent a large amount of time doing photometric calibrations for the KELT-South telescope. All this means is calibrating how bright stars look with our telescope compared to how bright the stars are in published catalogs.

We used the Tycho2 and NOMAD catalogs with B, V and R magnitudes to calibrate the KELT-South instrumental magnitude.

Sonoita, Arizona, USA

So I recently (17 - 21 September 2011) spent some time visiting the Winer Observatory in Sonoita, Arizona. I went down there to help Rob Siverd (the guy who does everything KELT related) fix the KELT-North telescope. They've been having some problems with the telescope not knowing where in sky it was pointing and we managed to trace the problem to some faulty "homing" sensors on the telescope mount. We managed to get it fixed in fairly short time, but let me first show you what Sonoita looks like ...

The image shows the view from the "lounge" of the observatory hostel, which is actually just the people who run the observatory's house. I was "unfortunate" to use this space as my sleeping quarters for a few days :)

So this is what the observatory looks like. It's just one big "garage" with a machine shop and warm room on the bottom and a big slide off roof on top with a few telescope underneath. Some of the telescope under the roof include DEMONEX, KELT-North and some telescope owned by the University of Iowa. The site is located about 30 miles north of the border with Mexico and Sonoita itself has a very large Border Patrol facility. The town itself only has one stop sign. I'd have to say that it's even smaller than Sutherland !!!

Here you can see some of the telescopes. On one of the days we needed a part for the telescope and drove the 45 minutes to Tucson. On the way there we first made a stop at the hardware store in Sonoita and this is the sign above the door that greeted us ... Next we encountered an aircraft graveyard ...

As far as the eye could see there were planes. Big ones, little ones, fat ones, skinny ones, broken ones, not so broken ones ... you name it, it was there.

So all in all, a good trip down to the south of the USA. Got stopped once by Border Patrol, ate lotsa awesome ribs and steak.

Bluebird on the Mountain (2nd)

So last night I spent another night volunteering at the Dyer Observatory for the Bluebird on the Mountain concert. It's an event held by the Bluebird Cafe during the summer and fall that is really cool. They invite some very famous singer/songwriters to play a few songs on the Observatory grounds and people come and watch and take a tour of the Observatory afterwards. Last nigh I listen the talented Bob DiPiero, Leslie Satcher and Al Anderson. I was really impressed by the musical talent.

After the music I stood around for about an hour answering questions the people had about telescopes and general astronomy related things.

Really good night.

Time for a revival !!!

Hey peeps, so I do know that there are not many of you out there that actually read this blog, but I'm just going to be updating it mostly for myself from now on. I'm doing some really cool things here in Nashville at the moment and I need to keep track of what I'm doing and on what days. So this blog will serve as a little public diary of sorts.

See y'all later

KELT South takes it's first images !!!!

Hey to all the readers of my blog, all 2 of you :)

We had a major event tonight. We attained what we in the astronomy field call "First Light", ie the first real images from our telescope that are actually useful.

We've been having some real problems over the last few days to get the telescope operational and at one point we actually thought that it wasn't going to be working at all. So tonight is a real good night for us and I'm really excited about the whole project again. Now I can't wait for the telescope to start it's real observing and the hunt for planets :)

Here are the two most awesome images on the planet at the moment.
The first one is a picture of the centre of the Milky Way and the second one actually shows the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (our two closest galaxies). The Milky Way was a 15 second exposure and the LMC and SMC was a 2 minute exposure.



For some really large versions of these two photos have a look at http://keltsouth.pbwiki.com/Sutherland+Deployment

Cheers

PS. I'll post another monster post some time tomorrow to fill in all the details about the last week or so. Lots of things have happened and I'll most certainly try and bore you :)

KELT South Pictures

Hey

Pictures of the KELT South project can be seen here:
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Rudi.Kuhn.001/KELTSouthPictures

It's much easier to upload them there than try and post them on the Blog. Blogger makes it really hard to place the pictures where you want them :(

Anyway, keep checking here and I'll let you know when I've update the Web Album.

Cheers

KELT South (monster) Update

Hey everyone

So, let me fill you in on what's been happening over the last week or so ...
The KELT South telescope finally arrived in Sutherland all safe and sound. It was only delayed by almost three weeks, so considering Africa time I'd say it's kinda right on schedule :) The telescope arrived on Tuesday (16 September 2008) and Josh and David were very excited. It's kinda disturbing seeing two grown men act like little kids on Christmas morning, but I suppose it's to be expected. They have spent many hours behind the scenes getting the telescope ready and testing various pieces of hardware.

Before Tuesday though, Josh and I have been coding many pieces of VBScript that we will use to automate the telescope. It's not until one starts writing the code that one realises that there are a lot more things to consider than you initially thought. So far I've been working on the Weather Script. This piece of code is probably one of the more important pieces because this code will read weather information from a couple of sources here in Sutherland and decide whether the telescope should actually open to start the observing run (and you don't want to be opening the enclosure in the middle of a thunder storm). The code is slowly coming to a point where I feel comfortable to load it on the control computer, but we will be doing many hours of testing before we leave the telescope to itself :) You can never trust that you have considered all the possibilities.

Tuesday morning/afternoon when the telescope finally arrived (at around 12pm) there was a lot of commotion as the truck that the crate was on, was slightly larger then we expected and the only place that we could actually offload the crate was at the SALT unloading dock. This meant that we roped all the SALT engineers and technical staff into helping us unload our little telescope. They must've been thinking very strange thoughts when they found out that our telescope was only a glorified camera, when they are used to working on the single largest telescope in the Southern hemisphere with equipment weighing in at many thousands of kilograms. When we finally got the crate off the large truck, we needed another vehicle to load it onto. The job was given to the trusty old Toyota One Tonner. The next big job involved offloading the crate from this vehicle and then unpacking the entire crate. This went rather well and we actually managed to dismantle the entire crate in just over an hour. There is a awesome little video of us unpacking the crate on the KELT-South Wiki (http://keltsouth.pbwiki.com/). We also had to decide where we were going to set up all the equipment and perform the initial testing of the hardware as well as our code to operate the telescope. We managed to get access to the visitors centre library and we decided to move the control computer, UPS, transformer, camera and mount into the library. By the end of the move, it was supper time and straight after supper we started planning out the rest of the week.


On Wednesday, Josh and I spent a large part of the day setting up the UPS and transformer in the library at the visitors centre. This will serve as our little lab for the next couple of days until the electrical lines have been pulled into the telescope enclosure (which we are hoping should be done by either Monday or Tuesday 22/23 September). It took us a really long time to actually figure out the entire UPS and transformer layout because the manuals that were included with these things weren’t really very explanatory. We had to ask Jaci (SAAO Electrical Engineer) and John Stoffels (Sutherland Site Manager) many questions that they probably thought were very easy, and things that every person (nevermind highly schooled astronomers) should know.


Thursday was spent finalising a lot of things with the builder and making sure that the cables and lights and doors and things were going to be fitted within a reasonable time frame. I was still working on the Weather Script and in the afternoon Josh and I started working on the Preparation Script. We also got the mount and the camera unpacked and hooked up to the UPS. The Preparation Script will execute about an hour before astronomical twilight and make sure that everything with the telescope and mount are OK. It will then take the bias frames and slew the telescope into a position where it will take the flat fields. Josh and I were also very excited to see the mount move for the first time by us issuing it a VBScript command.


Friday morning was spent adding some final touches to the Weather Script and just before lunch time we headed back to the hostel to see David off. He had to leave to make sure he got back to Hawaii before Monday when he started teaching again. I actually felt very sorry for him because he had come all this way to never see the telescope actually get installed. We promised to send him as many photos as possible and keep the Wiki site updated to ensure that he could at least track the progress. We will need his expertise over the next couple of days when we finally get the telescope into the enclosure and start testing the operations. The rest of the day was spent figuring out how the entire telescope will operate.

And that is the story so far. Hopefully I will have slightly more time to keep everyone updated on our progress, because another monster post like this one takes far too much time and effort :)

Have a good one people

KELT South begins

Hey everyone

The time has arrived for us to start on the construction of the telescope. The telescope isn't here in Sutherland yet, but there are many things we need to do before it arrives. We are hoping to take delivery of the equipment on Saturday (13 September) or Sunday. Then the real fun and games are gonna begin :)

At the moment we are writing some control software for the telescope, and my main job is to get the weather information from all the weather stations up on the hill and make sure the telescope observes when it should and close the roof when it should. Trying to figure out VBScript in the process as well. The learning curve is very steep, but I didn't expect anything less.

The men responsible for the KELT telescope, Joshua Pepper (from Vanderbilt University) and David James (from The University of Hawaii), are here in Sutherland as well. David will be responsible for the flat field screen and imaging and making sure the telescope performs as expected. Josh and I are responsible for everything else. And the "everything else" is a fairly long list to say the least. The photo above shows David on the left and Josh on the right trying to figure out how to use the camcorder they brought along to document the telescope construction. There is also some snow in the background (again). David was busy applying primer to the hardboard we will use to construct the flat field screen.

You can follow the progress and access some more technical details here: http://keltsouth.pbwiki.com/

Hope all is well
Cheers

SNOW !!!

Hey peeps

It's snowing !!!! It's been snowing for the last day or so as well. It started snowing at around 23:00 last night (30 August) and it continued to snow the entire night. I was so excited I didn't sleep much (I only went to be at around 4 this morning and woke up just after 9 again, I didn't want to miss out on the snow you see). It's been really cold too. If you have a look at the first two images below you will see that the temperature graphs for the night before and during the entire day today never went above 0 degrees. The wind has also been blowing the entire time at around 100 km/h. I've tried to take some photos of the snow, but they mostly turn out just white and the features I tried to photograph don't show up :( But, it's still snowing outside and when you walk outside there are some places where the snow in almost chest hight !!!

Enjoy the pics, and I hope you are all keeping fairly warm ...

Sutherland in photos

These are just some of the recent photos of Sutherland. I'll be adding many more of the next couple of days (seeing as it's cloudy again).

Adios

The Telescope Story Begins ...

Hey everyone

As expected, the dome of the telescope arrived on Monday and most of the day was spent setting up everything so that it could be completed the following day. The only thing was that it started snowing on Monday as well. And to make things even more difficult, the wind was well over 60 km/h. This made for a very cold combination. I was mostly standing around taking photos of the guys working on the rails for the roof to run on and every time I took my hands out of my pockets to take a photo, they would instantly freeze. Luckily the guys that were working had brought some gloves and warm clothing (they were warned before they arrived I suspect). So by Monday evening everything was in place to lift the roof onto the enclosure by Tuesday afternoon.

Tuesday (26 August) turned out to be a very pleasant day. The temperatures started at around -4 degrees C by sunrise but by mid afternoon it was close to 10 degrees C. There was no wind to speak of (which is highly unusual for Sutherland) and not a single cloud in the sky, and this meant that the roof could be lifted without any troubles. The roof was finally lifted onto it's rails just before 5pm that evening and it seemed very anti-climactic. I though it was going to be a big struggle and a fight with the rails and the alignment of the wheels, but it turns out that all the hard work and preparation the day before meant that all ran very smoothly. To see the dome finally in it's position was something really exciting. I can now see exactly what the telescope is going to look like and I'm very excited to start working on the project.

Wednesday (27 August) saw the guys from "Windeul Ingenieurswerke" doing the final finishing touches on the roof. The motor to control the opening and closing of the dome was installed, the edges were rounded nicely, insulation added and rubbers fitted. All in all I was very impressed by the guys and their attention to detail on the project. They definately made sure that we were completely satisfeid with the final product.

Throughout the whole process I was taking many photos, almost 250 in 3 days :)
Attached is one that shows one of the pillars being lifted into place. The white streaks in the background is the snow I was talking about.

Cheers

Kwêla comes to visit

Hey everyone

I got some awesome news. I might be on TV !!! A film crew from the TV show Kwêla (on KykNet) was doing a short piece on what happens in Sutherland, and since I'm the only astronomer/astronomy student up here at the moment that speaks Afrikaans, they came to visit me in the 1.0m dome last night. I had a full interview with Lise Swart and I'm very excited about the possiblity of being on TV :)

The picture attached is the little message that Lise left just before they headed back down the mountain. I'll try and find out exactly when the the piece will be shown on TV and you can be sure that I'll be posting that information on here too.

Oh, as far as observing is going this week, not good at all. I've been here for 4 nights now and not a single one has been usefull. The weather forcasts aren't looking good either, some even predict snow for Wednesday next week.

Cheerio