Tonight has been much less straightforward than previous nights; we’ve dealt with a succession of computer glitches in the camera controls, for starters. Nothing serious, and nothing that our telescope operator hasn’t been able to resolve fairly rapidly, but still enough to eat up some time. For most of the middle of the night, the seeing was poorer than we’ve seen on this run so far, and a strong wind forced us to shut the slats that normally allow steady airflow across the dome. However, there have been some highlights too; several of the images have been stunning, and we’re now rushing to get ahead of twilight as the conditions are the best they’ve been. For me personally, though, the highlight was stepping outside to observe dust much nearer to home. Just outside the door a few hours ago was the tail of Scorpius and its neighbouring constellation Sagittarius. Neither gets very high from home (parts of Scorpius don’t even rise), but there they were. To the left was Jupiter, shining more brilliantly than anything else in the sky – apart from the last quarter Moon, rising and shining red as it passed through the dust hanging above the desert floor. Looking back to Scorpius, the Milky Way was clearly visible despite the presence of the Moon (Nature’s light pollution). In front of the stars, the dark dust clouds that block our view of the Galaxy, and in this case a reminder to get back inside and get back to work.  

We’ll find a Kitt Peak related prize for whoever makes us laugh the most… 

Anyone keeping an eye on the blog should know that we’re looking at overlapping galaxies to try and understand the nature and distribution of dust in galaxies. Prompted by very pertinent questions from Barbara, our guest for the night in the control room, it’s suddenly occurred to me that we haven’t ever told you why we care about dust in galaxies.  Read More…

Fresh off the telescope, I wanted to share with you this spectacular spiral-spiral pair. Both of these galaxies probably look alike, but we’re seeing one edge on, and the other face on. (The bright thing on the left is a star, surrounded by reflections we haven’t had time to remove yet). The bright knots you can see in the face-on galaxy are likely to be bright star clusters, probably of young stars. Not only does this system look good, though, it’s pretty much ideal for our project. The edge on galaxy is clearly behind its face on neighbour (and these two are close together), whose spiral arms run in front of it. It’s also nice and smooth, so we can predict what light will hit the nearer galaxy – and use that to deduce its dust properties.   

It’s been a bit busier tonight; small problems with the software to deal with, and a group of migrant astronomers wanting help with their telescope among other things. In the meantime, here are the two most interesting objects of the night’s crop.  Goodnight all.  

Just before tonight’s observations began, I managed to record a quick interview with Bill. The background noises you can hear are the sounds of a telescope being rapidly prepared for action; listen very carefully and you’ll hear the ‘beep’ of the slewing telescope up in the dome.

We’ll try and do the same tomorrow, and if you have any questions for Bill (or Anna or myself) post them in the comments and we’ll do our best to answer

In the meantime, we’ve resorted to music to keep us all awake. As discerning people with eclectic tastes, we’ve resorted to attempting to compile a relevant playlist. If you can help us get beyond this, we’d be most grateful.

While Bill is once more pointing the telescope at the wall (in order to measure the noise in the camera), I thought you’d want to see the telescope that’s providing us with our beautiful images. The WIYN 3.5 m is the most modern of the big telescopes up here, and was opened for business in the mid 90s; as you can see from the image below, it has a very unusual and distinctive structure.
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It’s 2pm local time, and I’ve just managed to drag myself out of bed ready for our second night’s observing. During the day Kitt Peak is essentially a tourist destination; I just popped into the visitor’s centre to buy some water and found the third tour of the day getting briefed before setting off up the mountain. There’s also a public sky viewing program in the evenings, and they even rent out some of the smaller (but still substantial) telescopes on the mountain to anyone who wants to use them. It’s still sunny, and it won’t be long before we have to start preparing the telescope, but for now more prosaic thoughts dominate. Breakfast time…

P.S. If you want to follow our exploits in more detail this evening, we’ll be updating the newly established WIYN twitter feed.

Unbelievably, it’s already 2am on our first night on the mountain. Things are going pretty well; the seeing has improved somewhat and so far the camera seems to be performing well. More importantly, I’m managing to stay awake despite a bit of a slump for an hour and half – it turns out pots of coffee are the solution.Of course, this is just the start of the hard work. Behind me, Anna (a PhD student from the University of Alabama) is working hard at not swearing at the computer in the course of analysing the data properly; a painstaking process which we’ll describe in more detail later in the week. Meanwhile, to my left Bill is invoking supervisor’s privilege and doing a rough version of the same analysis. First results visible by clicking to read more.

Read More…

Well, it’s dark (although only just by astronomical standards). If you don’t believe me, then you can keep an eye on the all sky camera.

We’ve just headed over to our first object, which is the galaxy below.

As you might remember we’re investigating the Galaxy Zoo sample of overlapping galaxies. This is a fairly typical example; an apparently smaller galaxy (the round blob on the left) hiding behind a larger one. In fact, we know from Sloan’s measurement of the spectra of each of these objects that the blob on the left is more distant than its apparent neighbour. In fact, the distant galaxy is 1.6 Billion light-years away, and the closer one is ‘only’ 220 Million light-years distant. Our first trial image is up on Bill’s screen next to me now, and it looks reasonable. Although the weather is perfect – it’s completely clear – the seeing is pretty poor. Seeing is how astronomers measure the wobbling of the Earth’s atmosphere above us; that’s our main complaint so far. Still, the night and the week are young and it’s great to be on sky following up Galaxy Zoo for the first time.