Bad News

I got an email from the people in USA saying that the telescope that we will be building in Sutherland has been delayed by a week (and so it starts). This means that we will only start on the project in September and not at the end of August as we had hoped.

This prompted my supervisor here in South Africa to "design" a backup plan in case the telescope will not be completed by the time I need to hand in my thesis next year. This "backup" plan/project will run concurrently with the telescope deployment, which means for the first six months of my M.Sc degree I will be doing twice as much work as I should. This will ensure that I will at least have one thesis ready to hand in by the middle of next year.

It's going to be a tough time for me ....

No work and all play ....

Last night turned out to be quite serious, the wind was gusting up to 120 km/h last night. The people that live here on site told us that this is the worst wind they have ever experienced. All this meant that I didn't get to open the telescope dome again and so lost an entire night of observing :(

I'm on my way back to Cape Town now. It's been a really good week. I didn't get as much work done as I would have liked, but at least I'm feeling like I've had a small little holiday.

See you soon

The Last (K)Night

It's my last night up here tonight and I'm actually sad to be going home tomorrow. The night started out kinda nice. The wind was blowing slightly (at around 30 km/h or so), but soon turned ugly. At the moment the wind is howling outside at around 80 km/h again, and it's only 1 hour since I started :( At least I got some good data for the start of the night. I'm going to stay in the dome for the moment, the wind might die down again and I need to take a couple more data points at the end of the night. The entire dome is vibrating in the wind. It's kinda scary, I still have to srive down the mountain too. :(

Anyway, I'll keep you informed.

Snow?

Nope, none, nada. It was cold enough for snow, it got down to -2 degrees last night, but it didn't snow :( Unfortunately I wasn't in the cold. I was sitting watching the clouds and mist all night from the comforts of the Hostel Library.

Tonight looks like the best night to observe since I've been here. There is absolutely no wind and the atmosphere looks really stable. The stars outside are brilliantly bright and they are not even twinkling :) This is good news for astronomers. The less twinkling the less turbulent the atmosphere and the better the image quality. Not that I'm actually taking images of the stars, but some of the other people on the hilltop are. All I'm doing is "catching" and "counting" the number of photons from a particular star.

Anyway, it's back to work for me. I'll post some more stuff tomorrow :)