June 26, 2005

This day marked the start of my "Earth Watch experience" in Los Alamos. Starting my journey at Sea-Tac airport, I flew to Phoenix and then from Phoenix to Albuquerque. My flights were fairly anticlimactic, which, in retrospect I guess is a good thing. When I got off the plane I was a bit afraid that I wasn't going to see the Earth Watch team, or that somehow I'd miss them. My worries soon dissipated as I emerged into the main part of the airport and was met by MANY Earth Watch signs. In fact, almost all seven of the people waiting there were holding signs. Introductions were made, and, like always, I got asked the "so does it really rain in Seattle all the time" question. Basically things went as I expected.

On the drive from Albuquerque we stopped at a few places of note. First, we stopped at the Soda Damn, which I decided looked like a hobbit cave. It was an interesting geological site. Now I will describe it in very ungeological terms. Basically, water bubbled from the ground and into a pool that was the shape of a birdbath. The rock surrounding this pool was surprisingly unslippery. The water was warm and the little cave surrounding the pool was straight out of a science fiction book.

After the dam, we drove to Fenton hill observatory and looked around. Being daylight, we didn't look through any telescopes, but it was nice to get oriented. I was impressed by the RAPTOR's and am excited to hear more about them. These three telescopes are completely computer automated, they have CCD cameras in them that take pictures of space regularly with the aim of documenting and locating any new bright objects in the sky. I think that it's impressive that they could program a telescope to do some many things on it’s own. The RAPTOR's notify laboratories all over the world if it finds something of note. The brief explanation of the RAPOTOR constituted most of our tour at Fenton hill.

On the drive to the hotel we passed so many beautiful things. The arid, dry landscape of this place is so different from the green wet trees that I am used to. Where I live, an artist would need mostly cool colors, blue, green, etc to capture nature on a canvass. Here, one would use a warmer planet: red, pink, yellow, and even purple. Purple for the sunsets and the expressive sky. That's one of the things that I've noticed here in the last few days. The sky is so expressive. /Especially at night/ As we were soon to learn, the gigantic fluffy clouds serve as purple inspiration for artists, and impediments for star gazers.

June 27, 2005

What a packed day…what a packed brain. I feel like my memory capabilities are being tested. It's a good feeling. Now I know what my laptop feels like at home every time I download a different program or song to it. Today can basically be divided into three major parts.

This morning we learned about the CCD cameras (the type of cameras in the RAPTOR). It was cool because there was actually a camera in the room that we could experiment with. We analyzed boxes of pixels from pictures taken of subjects ranging from Gavin, John (and his forehead), and Whiny the Pooh. This may not sound very educational, but it was, and, by the time I walked out of the classroom at the end of the session, I felt like I knew a lot more about CCD cameras.

Next, we went to a talk at the Bradbury museum about the background of the Los Alamos Laboratories. War causes scientific and technological advancements. It depresses me that so many of the greatest discoveries made by humans are based on killing other humans. At the same time, it also impresses me that I am going to be spending two weeks in a place that has such a rich history and that is the employer to so many intelligent people. It's kind of overwhelming when you think about how many people work here, and they have been for so many years. The bottom line is that there have been lots of ideas floating around this general region. Floating ideas has translated into an energetic and curious community of thinkers. Having not been inside the any of the major laboratory facilities (except when we got our badges) I have only seen these people in the line at the subway on their lunch break. That is, aside from our team leaders who are all very smart and creative people.

The lecture was followed by another lecture later on in the evening. This talk was about Cosmology and more specifically about Dark Matter and Dark Energy. At this point, my brain was reaching saturation, and I found myself a bit confused about some of the things being presented. But I guess it's understandable since it's a rather confusing subject. When the lecture was over, it was still light outside, so we had a couple of hours to wait until we could leave and go up to Fenton hill to do our first star gaze of the expedition.

We arrived at Fenton Hill and were very awestruck at the clarity of the night sky. The Milky Way was so clearly visible that it blew me away. My neck was locked in the "looking at the stars" position for about the first hour as the others set up the telescopes. (I decided I would be best for me to get out of the way since I was distracted by the sky.) Once they were setup, the telescopes were pretty cool. Although, I think that I enjoy just looking with the naked eye the best so far. I most of the objects were trying to locate become eaten by the clouds or they only appeared as dim dots. Oh well, it was still a lot of fun. We left at 3:00am and arrived back at the hotel at 4:00am.

June 28, 2005

Today I woke up at 11:00am and decided to go checkout the exercise room in our Best Western. I was actually impressed. It was well equipped and it didn't smell too weird. Our breakfast/lunch was subway, and we all seemed very hungry after our night of stargazing. John told us about the Asteroid project that we are going to be doing. It consists of measuring the radius of an asteroid's orbit. So basically…Observe, Sketch, Math, Answer. Easier said that done. Now were are all just writing in our logs, the "tap tap" of the keys is a nice comforting sound, it reminds me of sitting in commons of my school. Next we are going to the opera…. More on that later.

Wow, the Barber of Seville is a lot better that I thought it was going to be. I really enjoyed the Opera house; it was an open-air theatre. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and off in the distance we could see a lightening storm. Truthfully, I think I was more transfixed with the view for the first act of the opera. It was also the case that the little translator thing didn't work for the first part of the opera, so that could have contributed to my diverted attention. By the second Act, my subtitle screen was working. The opera was pretty long (it lasted until midnight). When I first heard that we were going to be doing a project on transient phenomena in astrophysics I had no idea that we were also going to be going to the Opera.

June 29, 2005

/Ancient Condos/

Today began with a walk in Bandelier National Park. The Anasazi ruins were incredible. Built in the side of the rocky hills, these dwellings were nestled in the landscape. The people who used to live in them must have been in really good shape since every building had an entry that was only accessible by way of ladder. We walked all around the ruins and got to go inside some of the cave dwellings. The last dwelling we visited was a religious one that was built up high into the hill. To reach it, we needed to climb up four latters that were laid across the side of the hill face. For me, this was terrifying. I'm afraid of heights. "Know you limitations." In this case I knew that I'd be scared out of my mind, but decided to go up to the site any way since I wanted to see the "Kiva" and I also wanted to prove to myself that I could. So I did, and, as you can tell, I'm still alive; the heights may have been scary but they didn't kill me. 

After the hike, we went and got some codes for this computer system. The woman who helped us had MANY stuffed giraffes in her office. I think I was a giraffe in my past life. Is it ever possible to know what you were in your past life? Who knows? Anyway, tonight we are going to hear another Lecture. It's called "Impacts of Asteroids and Comets With Earth." After that talk there is the possibility of going to Fenton hill to get our first Asteroid data.

I wonder if the Anasazi people were astronomers. Their hilltop houses were certainly good star gazing real estate. Our society is square. Not in the dorky or uptight sense, but in the actually geometric sense. Out houses are boxes; they have square windows. Our lawns, pop tarts, and game fields are all more or less rectangular. At the Archeological site that we saw today, this was not the case; In fact, the Anasazi seemed to be very circular people. The lower ground level of houses was built in a circle. Windows cut into the side of the rocky hill face were circles. Their religious ceremonial buildings were also build in the shape of a circle. Maybe this has some sort of astronomical significance. The moon is round, so is the sun.

We went to a lecture about asteroids and comets. I must say the lecture itself was not very…well done, but I did find one part of it particularly interesting. When you think about it, that aren't any mammals that live on the cost and scavenge for food on the beach (only birds). This is most likely because the only animals that ever evolved to do this were wiped out by tsunamis that would have been caused by earthquakes and asteroids landing in the oceans. These impacts would cause huge waves that would wipe out any type on animal on the coast. Birds, being able to fly, would have avoided this problem. That was the coolest part of the speech.

We went to Fenton hill to observe an asteroid. We are going to determine the radius of the asteroid's orbit by the end of this trip. In order to figure out where exactly the asteroid is, we were given a general region in the sky of where the asteroid was expected to be. While looking through the telescopes, we sketched the stars that we saw into out notebooks. The next time we sketch this region of sky, we should be able to tell where which object it moving. This moving object will be the asteroid. There are a bunch of mathematical equations that we can use to determine the radius of the asteroid's orbit….they confuse me. Today we will be reviewing them in more depth. We returned from the observatory at 5:00am. I thought I was going to fall asleep while I was walking to my hotel room. .

June 30, 2005

So far all we have done today is wake up and eat lunch. After our late night, we are all ver sleepy and sort of zombie like. Tonight we might go to the observatory again for a picnic dinner.

We made asteroid sketches again. Mine was actually really really good. There's a feeling I got that was indescribable….kinda like a "wow, I actually did that on my own, and it works and looks really. neat." I enjoyed my sketching session because I got access to a telescope and it was uninterrupted. Tomorrow we are going to be calculating the actual radius of the asteroid's orbit.

June 31, 2005

Today we went to a concert at the Ski Slopes. It was really neat location for a concert, although the music wasn't really my style. It was an interesting experience being at the concert since it felt like I was the only one there who didn't know everyone else. Cool feeling. Not.

July 1, 2005

Today we calculated the orbit of an asteroid's orbit. This was fun because my sketch was actually really precise compared to last time and I could use it to base my calculations on. In the end, we came up with a number that said the orbit was around 2.5 AU. This number was fairly close to the actual number that was 2.48. Our calculations were based on a lot of assumptions though, so it wasn't a very accurate measure. After was did those calculations, I got to do a simulation with a Geiger counter. We tried to verify "yes," rock from a trinity site is more radioactive than our background radiation. (duh) Proving it was interesting and I actually used some math (standard deviation) that I thought was totally pointless at the time I was leaning it. "Everyday mathematics application" gives me a reason to keep going to math class.

We had a lecture about Mars and the possibility of water on mars. I really enjoyed this speaker. He was poised and had a lot of interesting simulated pictures of Mars. Basically the conclusion of the presentation was that is there us water on mars, then it must be mostly from the atmosphere.

July 2, 2005

DAY SEVEN: Saturday in Santa Fe (hey, that rhymes!)

We began the day by eating lunch/brunch at a restaurant on the way to Santa Fe called the Tesuque Village Market. Food was fine. People were nice. Nuff said. The rest of the day was spent out on the wild-west streets of Santa Fe. We were initially welcomed into Santa Fe by a man who was hostile towards the Los Alamos laboratories. He swore at us and then asked for beer money. Logically you'd think that first he'd ask for beer money, and then, upon us saying "no" begin swearing; apparently, this guy had things a little backwards…After the "welcome committee", we all went to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. There was a range of responses to the exhibit. Everything from, "Wow!! That was so awesome!" to, "If I ever see another painting of flowers, I think I might shoot myself." Our scientific team has now collected data to support the statement, ""Art is subjective."

After the museum, we were set lose into the city…town…well, more like village of Santa Fe. Emily² and I enjoyed walking in the stores and around the plaza while we looked at the art and jewelry. The guys, on the other hand, were less enthralled by eyeing vendors' wares, and they ended up eating at a burrito joint to pass that time. They also reported on buying a chocolate cigar that melted, seeing a semi-decent mariachi band, and walking around in circles. Sounds fun, no?

I found it very relaxing to sit in the Plaza and read a magazine for a bit. While I was reading, I saw a (seemingly intoxicated) woman with a kitten on a leash. That was odd. That was Santa Fe. That was day seven.

*****Moving onto night seven*****

We finally met the famous Mr. Galen Gisler, who had returned from his business trip to Europe. Also, we met the former Earth Watch volunteer, "Katie Walton." Together, we had dinner at the "Hill Diner." After our meal, we spilt up, and us students all went up to the observatory at Fenton hill. The night's activity was based on double stars. Our task was to locate binary (Double stars) and determine whether or not we could tell if they were two distinct, separate stars. On stars with a smaller separation of arcseconds between them, it got harder and harder to discern a noticeable difference between two stars. Us girls were able to get lots of data. We figured out that the smallest amount of separation we could distinguish between the binaries was a separation of 2.2 arc seconds. Not only did we collect a lot of data, but we were also able to learn more about how the telescopes work. We all got lots of "hands on" time. The guys had less luck collecting data, although they were able to view a couple of different double stars. After Fenton Hill, we returned to the hotel and slept.

DAY SEVEN: Flowers, melting cigars, and double stars. (Hey, that rhymes too!.)

July 3, 2005

Today we woke up late and we all went to Canyon school for an introduction on Radio Astronomy give by Don. This lecture gave us some basic scientific background as well as a historical background. We learned about Karl Jansky, the man who invented the first radio telescope; we also learned about Grote Reber and how he generated the first maps with radio waves. The lecture was very informative.

After the lecture we all went up to Fenton Hill and we had a Messier Marathon. We also were able to locate the comet that the NASA probe was going to crash into. I had a fun time attempting to set p a telescope with Katie Walton. We never really got it fully functioning but it was still fun.

July 4, 2005

Fourth of July 2005. Very memorable. Lots of people. Lots of fun. Galen Gisler invited us to his home where there were many other people including graduate students who are working at the lab. We all got to have a barbecue lunch/diner in his house. Susan, Galen's wife, made the best ice cake that I've ever had. (she hand made the ice cream!). The fire works show was in a huge park near a carnival. The fire works were very impressive. Katie and I ended up discussing polarized light, fetal pig dissection, and the fire works' speed of light vs. their speed of sound. After the fire work show, we all went back to Galen's house and Katie and Susan played Irish music on the guitar and the Hammer dulcimer. I tried to join in on the drum, though I was only partially successful. This was one of the best Fourth of July's I've ever had,

July 5, 2005

The VLA!!!! Today we went and saw a group of radio telescopes called the VLA (Very Large Array). This was probably my favorite part of the ENTIRE project so far. We were able to climb up on of the antennas and we got to go into a dish. Just the large scope of the telescopes impresses me. They feel almost sacred, like they have a religious feeling to them or something. They are how I imagine the statues at Easter Island to feel like.. They are so big and amazing in both size and importance. 27 of them- spread across the land- moving to face the heavens like they were alive and waiting for some sort of ephemeral relief from their seemingly permanent existence in the desert landscape. Just being there, looking across the desert at them, made me feel like I was witnessing something holy or mysterious. The wind added to the mystical feeling, and so did the smell of smoke from the fires in Arizona.

While we were there, we got to go into the room where all of the powerful computers are held. That felt impressive. To be in a room with machines that have the 'mental' capacity to compute at least 1 million times better than you ever could is a humbling experience. That was the VLA.

July 6, 2005

Today we went to Canyon school in the morning. While we were there we were able to watch footage from the NASA channel of the probe hitting the comet. It was interesting to see what type of images and how the qualities of the images were that the NASA station was receiving from the probe. After that, Galen gave us his speech on the Meteor impact event at Chicxulub, Mexico that occurred 65 million years ago and probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. I really enjoyed looking at his models/computer simulations and hearing about how they were made. After his speech we heard one by Todd Hains about Neutrinos. It was neat because he brought in really old science books and had people read passages aloud. They all sounded really really really dated and old. At the end of his speech he told us that 100 years from now everything that he had told us was probably going to sound as old and dated as what we just read in the books. After his speech we heard one by Ed Fenimore about Gamma Ray Bursts. This was my favorite Lecture that we have heard. It talked about detection of gamma-ray burst and about possible sources. Tonight we went to Galen's house and ate pizza and watched the movie "Contact."

July 7, 2005

Toda we went on a geology tour around the area. Our tour guide told us all about how the land formations and the rocks got to where they were. Apparently lots of the rocks that we see around the area were placed there by violent volcanic eruptions that displaced the rocks and sent them flying. I enjoyed collecting pumice throwing it into the water and watching it float. Rocks that float….pretty cool. Also I liked looking for fossils. Since New Mexico used to have a lot more water, and actually used to be under water, we were able to easily find fossils of shells (brachiopods) and coral. I tour was fun, and it was also nice because we got to go outside. After the tour we went to canyon school and worked on out presentation. I'm nervous about giving my part of the power point since the only type of presentation I've ever given has been at my school, or at the SDLC conferences. I guess after this one I'll add the "Los Alamos Labs" to my list of places I've given presentations.

July 8,2005

Today we gave our presentation. It went well, and people were nodding their heads a lot so I guess they understood what we were saying. After our lecture, we get to go over to Dons house and he made us a lot of yummy food and let us sit in his addictive, comfortable chairs. I saw three different types of bees in his yard: Orange butt bee, Yellow huge butt bee, and all white poisonous looking bee. They were really neat and they buzzed around the yard with the humming birds that also buzzed around. After the BBQ, we went to our last Bradury Museum lecture about Saturn at Cassini.

Around the pond there was an outdoor concert that was free and just felt like summer. We all sat in the grass and played with the Rubiks cubes that we bought off line. I think that the people around us might have thought we were all really dorky. Lol. When I get home I'm going to have to find an astronomy lecture series to go to because I'll miss regularly hearing about what research is going on.

July 9, 2005

Today we got to go up to Fenton Hill. Don showed us all of his radio equipment. Our call sign was W5PDO and we were able to contact people in Washington State and Japan. Bad luck. Couldn’t contact people cause there was a contest going on. People mostly just played with their Rubiks Cubes anyway. We got a tour of the RAPTOR, it mostly took pictures the whole time. I'm going to miss the shop Fenton Hill, I really like all of the equipment that there is. It almost feels haunted up there…