Pea Hunting preamble
Greetings from the ESO Guest House, in Santiago de Chile! As I described in a blog post) a while ago, I am here on a mission to hunt for more distant counterparts to the ‘Peas’) which were first identified by Galaxy Zoo participants.
This is the first Galaxy Zoo initiated observing project to use an ESO telescope, so I thought I would take the opportunity to give you a bit more of an insight in to an ESO observing trip. ESO is the European Southern Observatory, which operates observatories in Chile in order to provide European astronomers with access to the Southern sky. These are among the most technologically advanced and scientifically productive observatories in the world. ESO’s premier facility is the, imaginatively named, Very Large Telescope (VLT), located at Paranal observatory in the middle of the Atacama desert. The VLT actually comprises four massive telescopes which are usually used separately, although their light can be combined for special observations.
For our observations we don’t need quite so much light-collecting power, so will be using the smaller, but still very capable, New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla observatory, also in the Atacama, but in its slightly more hospitable Southern outskirts.
The ESO Guesthouse
I, and my observing colleague Seb Foucaud, arrived in Santiago earlier today after long journeys from the UK and Taiwan, respectively. ESO is an extremely well organised operation and really looks after visiting astronomers. We were met at the airport by an ESO representative and driven to the Guest House in the affluent Las Condes suburb of Santiago. The Guest House is renowned for its hospitality, friendly staff, good food and the traditional Pisco Sour cocktail before dinner. Most visiting astronomers stay here for one night before and after their observing run. Tomorrow morning we fly to North to La Serena and then drive to La Silla observatory to begin the preparations for our run, which starts on Thursday night. Right now I’d better get some much needed sleep. I’ll give you an update when we get to the observatory.
New images in the Zoo
As you may already have heard, Galaxy Zoo has new images in it this week!
You may remember my post in September which described how we’ve added images from SDSS’s ‘Stripe 82’. This is an area of the Sloan survey that has been repeatedly imaged to do things like supernova detection (much like that in Supernova Zoo – you have to look at the same place more than once to see what has changed). A benefit of this is that we can add all these images up to make an image that’s like having a much longer exposure than the ordinary SDSS uses.
She's an Astronomer: Karen Masters
Karen and her daughter, Sept 2008.
Dr. Karen Masters is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth (also the 2008 Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation IAU Fellow). Originally from the Birmingham (UK) area, she did an undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of Oxford (Wadham College) then moved to the US to do a PhD in Astronomy at Cornell University (in Ithaca, NY). After 3 years as a postdoc at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University (in Boston, USA) she moved back to the UK last year. Karen lives in Portsmouth with her husband (Wynn Ho, who is also an Astronomer – check out his Nature paper this week on the neutron star in Cas A (arxiv)), their 2 1/2 year old daughter and their cat. She is currently expecting her second child, due in the spring. She enjoys watching movies on TV (and misses going to the cinema), does yoga for relaxation, and wishes she could read more than one page of her book before falling asleep.
Galaxy Zoo 