Owen's Page

At first the thought of spending the second half of my June in New Mexico seemed to be a rather "hot" idea. As time wore on though, I learned that I would be staying at quite a high altitude and have the chance to engage in some astrophysics.

Day 1

The thing that remains on my mind from this first day is the impression I must have made on teammates. For the first few hours we all seemed to be relitivly quiet. I however had my reasons. Through a great combination of motion sickness, eating too much Mexican food, and a van ride through a winding pass, I was able to really entertain my newfound friends through a display of projectile vomiting.

Day 2

My second day in Los Alamos brought a new prespective on the whole area. Mainly I was able to look at things that weren't on the ground. The first order of the day was to get our security badges. This turned out to be a rather anti-climatic event. I learned that I was only able to attain "C" security clearance, a far cry from "Q." With that my dreams of using the optical hand readers, reading the secrets of nuclear weapons, and working in secret labs vanished. However I heard that getting hard drives out of the area wasn't all that difficult. In the afternoon we learned about using the CCD camera, a device for taking images of objects in space. The night consisted of a lecture from Ed Fenimore on how the scientific processes that I have learned over the last 13 years of great public schooling have no practical application. I also learned about the local supermarket named Furr's, the home of great deals.

Day 3

My third day in New Mexico was highlighted with a trip to Santa Fe. There we were able to visit the Planetarium, and not wanting to have a repeat of Sunday night, I decided to use the time to sleep. The sleep was well needed though, as this would be our first night of observing at Fenton Hill. Most people I think would agree that the best part of the day revolved around my a-capella renditions of Stix's Mr. Roboto, and Queens Bohemian Rhapsody. After this, seeing various constillations and quite a few of the Messier objects seemed quite anticlimatic. I learned about the night life of astrophysicists, which consists mainly of insomnia and telescopes. Quite suprisingly I seemed to be the only one in need of a caffiene fix. The night rolled over into June 21, Galen's birthday, and in order to celebrate this event we decided to vandalize his neighborhood. Not really, we just spray painted rocks and stole street markers just to place in his front yard. I was also able to impress my peers with remarkable pole climbing ability.

Day 4

The fourth day brought about a lecture from Harrison Schmitt, the last man to walk on the moon, and as I have heard the only scientist. His lecture was about his travels to the moon, and also his future plans of mining the moon for H-3 and then colonizing it. This was projected to be done in 10 to 15 years. We then attended a party at Galen's house, where we ate tacos, and burnt enough candles to almost start another Los Alamos blaze. The day was concluded with another trip to Fenton Hill. This night however we concentrated on bianary star systems, and started to use the CCD camera.

Day 5

Finally a day where we got to catch up on sleep! The day was pretty basic, we got our web page up and running, ate some pizza, and we were introduced to good ol' New Mexico thunderstorms. In the night we had a lecture on Mars, and the water found on it. My night was spent watching pretty dumb movies, and playing dominoes.

Day 6

I went into Friday feeling pretty rested. In the morning we hiked around old indian ruins just outside the town of White Rock. Although the tour was interesting I found that feeding the Fire Ants candy was quite fun. Our first lecture of the day was from Galen, we heard about the Milky Way Galaxy, and got a better feeling for what it all was. Friday evening we went to a lecture by the directors of ROTSE. This lead into Friday night when we got to experiment with the ROTSE telescope. The telescope is comprised of four CCD cameras on mounts that can look at a wide portion of the sky. The ROTSE project was the first to see an optical portion of a Gamma Ray burst. At about 11 o'clock we set off for Fenton hill. My night was spent looking for bianary stars, and some of the higher magnitude Messier objects. I finally fell to exhaustion around 4 a.m. whereby the cement pad seemed rather comfortable, and I fell asleep. Just before dawn I was woken up, but for a good cause, I was able to observe both Jupiter and Saturn through the telescopes. I was finally able to sleep comfortably in a bed just after the sun rose at 6.

Day 7

Saturday, another day of rest! I slept peacefully until just after noon. Our day was relitivly quiet, our only formal buisness of the day was a lecture from Don. The lecture focused around radio astronomy, and it's advantages. It was pretty interesting and gave our possible radio observing session of Jupiter a since of excitement. In the afternoon we all took part in a mean game of water basketball, which at 7000 feet, is a lot more tiring than it may seem. Saturday night brought us back to Galens house, for a great home cooked meal and a viewing of the movie "Contact." We went home early, at least in my terms, and I was in bed by 1.

Day 8

Wow! Two days of rest in a row, our first activity was not until the mid afternoon. Some of us went to church, but the rest of us slept in taking full advantage of our day off. The first business of the day was our hike at Bandelier National Park. There we got to hike all around and climb up the latters and see the ancient Indian Pueblo's. For dinner we had a picnic at Fenton Hill, followed by a recital in the forceful exertion of air from one's stomach. All I can say is I broke all sorts of records. The night was nice and clear, and I got a lot of hands on experience with the C-14. We saw such neat objects like the Sombrero Galaxy, and other deep space objects. The clouds moved in around 3:30 a.m. and we were forced to leave.

Day 9

Tody was another pretty easy day. Our first leture was at 2:00 p.m. about the solar system. That was a whole lot of information flying at us at once. In the afternoon I updated my website, and worked on some of my other stuff. At night we had another lecture by Geoff Reeves on the northern lights. It also was pretty interesting, but because of my sleep dificientcy seemed like a long speech. For the rest of the night I gave into my wants and slept.

Day 10

This mornings geology tour was cancelled because our guide got really sick with a viral infection. Instead of the tour we just headed up to Fenton Hill to set up some of our radio astronomy stuff. We had to do a bunch of setting up in order to make the antanae as efficient as possible, like fixing shorts and the antenna's frame. I also worke on putting up some CCD images on the website, although it was more watching Kristen work than anything else. The highlight of our day was eating at spikes, a small restaraunt that reminds me of the one I used to work at. In the evening we had a lecture on the Lodestar project, the bane of my exsistance. Unfortuneatley the lecture was overshadowed by my past experiences.

Day 11

The tour of the VLA. I was pretty excited coming into today. I ahve always had a fasination with this site, and seeing it didn't really let me down. The day started at 8, when we left for the Array. Between working out and getting ready I had no time for breakfast but luckily I got some cookies from Kristen to eat instead so I still had food. The tour was fun, we got to go up in a dish and almost got struck by lightning. Afterwards we ate in a steakhouse, and on the return trip I tied J.W. to his seat with twine, just because it seemed fun, and when he woke up angery, it was well worth it.

Day 12