Our Earthwatch program, Transient Phenomena in Astrophysics, was originally intended to help us in installing and debugging an automated remote observing station dedicated to the astrophysics of transient sources - things like supernovae, novae, gamma-ray bursts, flare stars, asteroids and comets - objects that change by large amounts while the rest of the celestial sphere seems eternal and unchanging. This observing station was to have been set up on Fenton Hill, in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, 21 miles due west of Los Alamos.
When it became apparent, last winter, that we would not have any equipment permanently installed on Fenton Hill in time for our program, we decided to shift emphasis and perform measurements at Fenton Hill and other places in the Jemez Mountains, in order to ascertain the usefulness of these sites for an astronomical observatory for transient phenomena. These measurements can be performed with equipment that is reasonably portable, but such a campaign requires a substantial effort, and the opportunity presented by having a group of talented and energetic youngsters seemed very well matched to the effort. In some respects, this campaign would be more interesting and fun than the original plan, because there would be substantially more field work, and less predictability. It also would be riskier: there might be no result at all from the campaign, if the weather is unusually bad.
Wednesday, 7/23/97
The students arrived last Sunday, the 20th, which was a day that had been marked on my calendar in blood for many months. While Dee Robbins had been so patient with me, so encouraging, so dear, as we tried to put together a program that made sense, I could not help but feel real fear that things would not work out at all, that it was all going to be a disaster. I cannot say how many times I felt like calling the whole thing off.
Fenton Hill not being ready, owing to bureaucratic snafus between the lab, the Forest Service, and the Department of Energy, was only a part of it. Orchestrating the student mentors, educating them to the program, and making sure they would get something out of it themselves, was another part. Doing the logistics of the site selection process included venturing out on hazardous roads in government vehicles, and brought us to the realization that the vehicles available to us were going to be inadequate to the needs of the campaign, resulting in a major expense for vehicle rental that had not been included in our budget estimates. I expect we'll have to absorb the loss. More nightmares.
My apprehensions and fears evaporated as we (Don Casperson, Michelle Beaver, Donna Powell, my wife Susan, and I) met the arriving students at Albuquerque airport. Most auspiciously, Earthwatch had done a tremendous job in coordinating travel so that all 8 arrived on three planes, within an hour of each other, and at adjacent gates, no less! We never needed the rendezvous point at the biplane that had been advertised in the briefing. Our conversations began in earnest while we were waiting for the luggage and discovered how much we all had in common. We had lunch in the La Placita restaurant in Albuquerque's Old Town, and began to get to know one another. I knew from that moment that this group was special, that we were going to have an extraordinary experience together, that things were going to work out, and that I would dread their departure even more than I dreaded their arrival.
We have now been together three days. We've had some lectures on astronomy, some diversionary talks for fun, some safety briefings. The students attended a formal public talk on the Big Bang by Rocky Kolb on Monday night, and a laboratory colloquium on astrophysical dynamos by Stirling Colgate on Wednesday morning. Both events produced a great deal of discussion, and it became clear to me that many of these students are operating at an intellectual level on a par with many scientists I know. It is becoming easy to think of them as colleagues, but I have to guard against expecting too much. I encourage their questions by telling them there are no "dumb" questions, only "dumb" answers - and then I'm astounded by the depth of understanding their questions show.
We've also played in the classroom at Canyon School with CCD cameras, with focusing telescopes, and with rudimentary image analysis. We have learned that the systems we have available to us have some major limitations and drawbacks with respect to the work we want to do, and we'll have to figure out how to live with them.
We have two types of CCD cameras, one from Axiom Research and the other from Photometrics. They have very similar CCD chips, but very different hardware and software. The Axiom Research camera has a very nice software package that comes with it allowing one to focus, take data, save it in a variety of formats, and analyze the data without exiting the program, which is called Mira. Unfortunately, the camera has a readout mechanism that is very slow, taking the better part of a minute per frame. The Photometrics camera reads out via SCSI, and is very fast. But the software provided with that is minimal. For focusing, one can use the CamTest code that came with it, but it has no ability to save data, or even to analyze it (which for focusing is essential). Michelle Beaver wrote code to read out and save data from the camera, but her code does not display images or do analysis. Also the format for saving files is yet untested. We'll see how it goes.
Tonight we got our first exposure to the night sky, at the site in Los Alamos where our Michigan collaborators have temporarily set up the ROTSE (Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment) instrument. The weather hasn't been great, but everyone was itching to take the equipment out and get started. Unfortunately, the bright lights at the end of the LAMPF accelerator make the ROTSE site poor for our purposes (I'm not sure how ROTSE accommodates, except they're not yet in position to take serious data), and the rise of the moon curtailed our observations about midnight.
Saturday, 7/26/97
Things are going very well indeed. What a terrific team! We had a great night on Thursday at Fenton Hill. It was spectacular, the Milky Way was so bright and clear, you could see the dust lane splitting it right in two all the way across the sky. We spent a lot of time just looking through one of the telescopes, the 7" Meade Maksutov, and showing off things like the Ring Nebula, the Whirlpool Nebula, some globular clusters, planets, and double stars. We actually didn't get very much real data because we were too excited about showing things and just looking. We had the Photometrics camera mounted on this telescope, so the software was an obstacle in taking data.
The other telescope, the big 12" Ritchey Chretien on the Alt-Az mount (known as the LDRD telescope), gave us a lot of trouble, unfortunately. It has no eyepiece, and therefore the only way to focus is by using the Axiom CCD camera and repeatedly taking exposures, adjusting the focus until you get it right. We spent the whole night trying to focus it, and almost got there by the time the moon rose. Unfortunately, we later discovered that the adaptor between the filter carriage and the CCD camera was in the wrong position.
This was our "deep night". Many of the students were seeing the Milky Way with their own eyes for the very first time, and probing the distant wonders of Nature through telescopes also for the first time. Science as direct investigation of Nature, with our own senses, was brought home to them in a way that no textbook is ever able to communicate. This shared experience engendered deep philosophical, existential, and spiritual discussions among the students. The meaning of life, our role in this vast Universe, and the eternal tension between Design and Chance.
I had earlier tried to convey a particular notion of mine, that physics is so much more than physics, meaning, in my original intention, that you have to pay very careful attention to things like plumbing, and wiring, and adaptors, and foundations, and concrete in order to do your experiment right - or your theory, for that matter. On our "deep night", the notion was turned on its head: physics - or astronomy - gives you a window into that which is so much greater than physics.
Ed Takashima is as tenacious as a bulldog, taking exposure after exposure, and adjusting the focus controller each time. He said he was trying to learn patience. Earlier, when the nights were all cloudy, I had told everyone that patience was the most valued quality an astronomer could have. We did get some data with both telescopes, however, and tomorrow we'll look at it and see how well we did. Yesterday afternoon we had a troubleshooting discussion about how things went on Thursday and how we might be able to improve the experience. We'll probably go back to Fenton Hill Monday night. We have been working on a web site for the team, and we'll use that as our log. Everyone has been taking pictures, but we can't really take pictures while we're working at night because it would spoil our dark-adapted eyes. I need to think of some way to document that part of it. Another document that will come out is the paper table cloth we all decorated at Central Avenue Grill.
We met Carrie Avery yesterday for lunch, and one of the things that came out was that the students were realizing we were almost halfway done, and were expressing sadness that the time remaining was so short. They've really bonded to each other. Me too. I know I will miss them when they've gone.
One of the things I did with
the group yesterday afternoon was to give them a little talk about
"The Winter's Tale", the Shakespeare play they saw last night, in
which I have the fortune to be playing in the little stage orchestra
for Shakespeare in Santa Fe. A very nice thing about this play, which
ties in very well with the entire Earthwatch experience, is the
relation that Shakespeare explores between Nature and Art. Art, of
course, implies man's intervention in Nature, and investigation of
Nature, as well as its conventional modern meaning. There is a dialog
in Act IV between King Polixenes, in disguise, and Perdita, the lost
daughter of King Leontes, brought up by a shepherd and in love with
Polixenes' son. Polixenes challenges Perdita to plant a certain
hybrid flower, gillyvors, in her rustic garden. She refuses, saying
that she will have no product of "Art" in Nature's garden. Polixenes
answers:
Yet Nature is
made better by no mean
But Nature makes that mean; so over that Art,
Which you say adds to Nature, is an Art,
That Nature makes.
He urges her again to
plant those gillyvors, since they are still part of Nature even if
humans had a part in changing them. The director of our production
seems to approve this sentiment by having the general crowd give
assent. Yet Shakespeare gives the final word to Perdita, advocating
unspoiled Nature in the earthy language of a shepherdess:
I'll not
put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them;
No more than were I painted, I would wish
This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me.
The debate has now continued nearly 400 years, and Shakespeare's contribution to it is surprisingly little known.
Tuesday, 7/29/97
I'm sorry to say the weather is not cooperating. It's been raining steadily for the last two days. We went up to Fenton Hill yesterday in spite of it, and did make some improvements in our procedure for setting up and taking down, but no science. The sky cleared for ten minutes at one point, but it wasn't enough time for us to get started even. I had to cancel our scheduled trip to Pajarito Peak today after talking to the administrator of Zia Pueblo and getting an update on the road condition. It's probably washed out - and was treacherous enough even when bone dry. I believe at this point the most we will be able to get is one more night at Fenton Hill - because that's the only place we'll be able to get to on paved roads, and because the forecast looks really bleak. I'm really scared of putting these young lives at risk on treacherous mountain dirt roads in this season of lightning and flash floods.
We went to Santa Fe today, and enjoyed the new Georgia O'Keeffe museum and walking around the plaza. The students are still a game bunch, and flow with the punches, their common sense of humor helps immensely. The frustration is beginning to wear on some of them, however, and one or two of them don't share the others' fondness (one might say obsession) for puns. I'm finding myself getting a little depressed now, from a combination of the bad weather, and the fact that I will soon have to send these charges of mine home, somewhat disappointed I fear.
I did enjoy meeting Meg Warren yesterday, and she even came up to Fenton Hill with us. I wish we could have showed her some science - she saw our web stuff, and our conditions, and our humor.
Our Photometrics system has died, cause unknown - could be computer, camera, or cable. That means we're down to visual observations through one telescope, and using the Axiom camera through the other. We'll live with it, if we ever get clear weather.
Thursday, 7/31/97
Yesterday at 10:30 in the morning, after studying the weather maps once again, and looking out over our drenched lawn, I decided to take a break and drive the students down to the VLA: the Very Large Array radio telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, featured in the Jodie Foster movie Contact, situated near Socorro NM, about 3 1/2 hours south of here. I asked Donna Powell, our chaperone, to mobilize the students, and by 11:15 we were on the road! The first reaction of several of them was disappointment that we couldn't do our science, but Tim in particular had been very interested from the beginning in the possibility of going there, and they've all seen Contact, so it wasn't hard to get them psyched up.
We had a great tour. I reached my friend Dave Finlay, who's the public affairs rep at the VLA, and he happened to be giving a tour to a couple of Albuquerque Journal reporters, so we could fit right in. The reporters also interviewed some of the students. It's about a 4 hour drive from here, but everyone did fine. In the car I was driving, we sang Beatles songs, show tunes, and Disney tunes all the way back. It's amazing how many songs Nicole knows, for one so young - and a nice voice too.
Today we will have a barbecue at our house. We'll be grilling in the rain, I bet. Afterwards I've promised we would have a jam session - Beatles and Celtic - since many of them are musicians, and all the rest love music.
I wrote in the briefing that the weather this time of year is difficult, but even the usual pattern is broken this year. Normally we have clear mornings, afternoon thunderstorms, and clearing through the night. This week, however, we've had steady drenching rains for days and days - more like winter storms than summer storms - and it's been cold too. We've mellowed out, though, and accommodated to the situation. Seeing the VLA helped.
One of the most memorable experiences from the visit to the VLA seemed to be an omen, even biblical. As we left the VLA, we saw an incomplete rainbow that appeared to be emitted from one of the radio telescope antennas. Of course we had to stop for everyone to take pictures. Then on the main road, we seemed to be heading right into the apex of the rainbow, which was gradually completing itself over our heads. It eventually did complete, and an outer rainbow formed, completing itself as well. I hope the pictures come out - we all spent a lot of film on this spectacle. The colors were among the most intense I've ever seen, and the students, especially those from urban settings, were absolutely enthralled and awed. In addition to the secondary outer bow, the violet edge of the brilliant inner one had some additional orders within, giving a most impressive display. US highway 60 from the VLA to Socorro lines up straight for several miles along the axis of the late summer setting sun, so it really did appear as if we were traveling into, and under, this brilliant rainbow. This was our "hallowed day", to go along with our "deep night" of the first week.
Saturday, 8/02/97
Patience and prayer finally paid off - we got data, the students gave a presentation to my group at the lab, and they went off to get more data last night without me.
The day after the VLA trip (Thursday), we had already planned a barbecue at my house. It looked as if it might possibly clear, so we made plans to eat early. We had to cut short our jam session, to my regret (at least). Cathy plays hammered dulcimer quite well, and penny whistle, so we did some O'Carolan tunes, with Susan and Cathy on whistle and dulcimer, and me on the harp. It's nice having a collection of odd instruments for such occasions. Everyone had a go at the conch shell, and we would have gotten around to playing Beatles on the piano, but...
After dessert, one of my undergraduate student mentors, Guthrie Partridge, phoned his parents, who live close to Fenton Hill, and found it was likely to be totally clear. So we piled into the vans, loaded up the equipment, and went up. We brought Don's 10-inch Meade in addition to the 7-inch Maksutov, leaving the massive LDRD telescope at home. We made visual observations with Don's telescope, and CCD observations through the Maksutov with the Axiom camera.
We worked all night, and made several important measurements. It was not a great night, as the humidity was very high, and clouds came in and out. Heavy dew covered the telescope corrector lenses when we packed up at 5 am, so we knew we had only made upper limit measurements to the seeing. We got back to Los Alamos at 6 am Friday morning, and the students were scheduled to make a presentation to our transient astrophysics interest group at 1:30. Things had looked so bleak the day before in terms of what they would be able to say, and now they had lots of data and only 7 hours to analyze it and get some sleep! What troopers they are!! They pulled it off brilliantly! And they impressed many of my colleagues with their understanding of the business and with their self-confidence. We want to hire these kids, now! And we now know that the seeing at Fenton Hill on a fairly rotten night is about 2 seconds of arc - and bound to be better under better weather.
After the presentation, they looked at the skies and decided to try to do one of our distant sites (the major goal of our expedition) on that last possible night. I couldn't be with them because of my commitment to Shakespeare in Santa Fe, but Donna went, and the three student mentors Michelle Beaver, Heather Pickett, and Guthrie. The choice was between Pajarito Peak, which is likely to be the better site but has a lousy (steep, rocky, and narrow) road, and Blue Bird Mesa, which has the better road. Michelle was very keen to do Pajarito Peak, but I had heard from someone who knows the area well that the road there turns to the consistency of glue after heavy rain. Pajarito Peak is on Zia Pueblo land, for which we required a permit from the tribe to access. Both Donna and Michelle talked to the Zia Pueblo tribal administrator in the morning, and were assured that the road would be okay. I laid on both of them the heavy responsibility for the safety of these youngsters and urged them to be absolutely confident of the road first, and to leave open the possibility of trying the other site that's easier to get to. I was very anxious until this morning when I retrieved 3 phone messages from Donna - first that they had gotten to the top of Pajarito Peak, had set up the telescopes and their camp - second that they had had a terrific night and were about to set off down the mountain - third that they had reached the bottom of the mountain and would be back in the lab to analyze the data this evening after their visit to the Jemez Pueblo Feast Day.
It's going to be very hard to send them back home tomorrow. I've grown very attached to them!
Tuesday, 8/05/97
My life suddenly seems very quiet and relaxed here. Taking leave was traumatic, as expected, and there were tears, both acknowledged and not, in many eyes. Yet I know I'll see many of them again, some as UGS students here, or as GRAs, or perhaps eventually as postdocs. Or I'll run across their names in the professional journals, or see them at American Astronomical Society meetings.
I went with Don Casperson yesterday to Canyon School to retrieve the expedition supplies. Our sign was still on the door, and the hall and classroom seemed haunted. We missed having the eager hands helping us hoist the LDRD telescope into the van, and eventually into its home in the cellar. We'll bring it out again, we'll even get an eyepiece made for it, but it won't be the same.
The data from Pajarito Peak seem to support a seeing measurement somewhat better than at Fenton Hill, perhaps 1.5 arc seconds, but the brightness of the city lights of Albuquerque are definitely detrimental. On reflection, perhaps we should have tried Blue Bird Mesa instead. We'll definitely keep both sites on the list for further investigation.
The problem with the Photometrics camera system apparently turned out to be the cable. A new one is on order, and we should be able to take data with it again in a couple of weeks. We are also pursuing options for the improvement of the software.
*** Watch this space for links to our data ***
General Conclusions
A project like ours necessarily has a variety of goals, some explicitly stated, some implicit, some of broad interest, and some rather narrowly focused. The individuals who take part likewise do so from a variety of motives. To the extent that we satisfy those motives, and achieve those goals, the project is seen as successful or not.
I direct the following comments to the students. Often, during the course of the two weeks you were here, I heard some of you express doubt that the experience would be of use to LANL. Those of you who expressed such doubts were usually quick to point out that you were gaining a great deal of knowledge and experience, but wondered what was in it for us. I will try to answer that now.
Firstly, I must say that I was surprised to find you worrying about the benefit to us, and therefore ill-prepared to answer you. In an age which is increasingly me-oriented, it is indeed refreshing to find a group of young people so well-centered as to give primary consideration to the benefit of their contribution to others rather than to themselves.
The specific goal of this project, as stated in the briefing, was to begin a program of making snapshot measurements of the astronomical seeing at various sites in the Jemez Mountains and to establish the viability of such sites for an astronomical observatory. This was the broad answer I gave to questions from LANL management of "What's in it for us?". Sub-goals essential to the achievement of the specific goal included: field-testing of both the Axiom and Photometrics CCD cameras, of the Meade 7-inch Maksutov and of the "LDRD" 12-inch Ritchey Chretien telescope-camera interfaces, debugging of the software for reading and analyzing data from the cameras, and the development (and trouble-shooting) of procedures for field operations, including vehicles and logistics. Weather was of course known to be the major obstacle towards achieving the specific goal, and the limitations of the Earthwatch schedule prevented us from choosing a more reliable time of year for this project. Nevertheless, even under a total washout, we felt the sub-goals could be reliably achieved.
We did very well. A number of equipment and software problems surfaced, and were dealt with. Procedures for field operations were implemented and tuned up during the course of the two weeks, even on nights when it was impossible to take data. The telescopes were well-tested, and we learned important lessons in how to make seeing measurements. Observations of weather patterns and of site characteristics have improved our understanding of the limitations of the sites available to us. Finally, we did make our seeing measurements, which were the first ever done at Fenton Hill and at Pajarito Peak. They were done under poor weather, but the data are nevertheless important.
Could we have done these things without you? In principle, yes. In principle, we could round up 8 or 10 regular lab employees and students on an auspicious afternoon, mount an expedition, and make some measurements. But this hasn't happened, and the reasons are several. People here are already obligated pretty heavily to a variety of different projects and other demands, and equipment is difficult to mobilize on short notice, since computers and generators and cameras are also frequently multiplexed between projects. We do need to make more measurements, and the prospect of doing them without you (or, should I say, without a team assembled just for that purpose) is a little daunting. October is generally a month of reliably clear skies, so I could almost pick any night near new moon, say October 1st, and say we're going to make seeing measurements at Blue Bird Mesa. I would still have trouble in mounting the expedition, unless I had a team already primed and partially mobilized for the purpose. But I have not had regular funds to support that - yet.
You see, your presence here, invited by Earthwatch and supported by the Durfee Foundation, brought focus and major attention to an effort to meet a need (not just seeing measurements, but Fenton Hill Observatory itself) widely acknowledged but poorly supported. The fact that you were coming here to do seeing measurements enabled me to attract support from others at LANL for the entire effort of establishing Fenton Hill Observatory, and to build momentum for that purpose. The Science Education Office, the Bradbury Science Museum, the Physics Division Office, and the Nonproliferation and International Security Division Office, all of which had been aware of our efforts and the potential benefits to them, have all now received actual benefit, from your activities and from the funding that came in through Earthwatch. The educational and recruitment potential in these activities is for the first time realized in you. Encouragement from these offices to proceed further with Fenton Hill Observatory is now not just merely offered, but insisted. You've helped me bust the roadblocks, though you couldn't have known (nor could I have anticipated) just how.
But first let me say something about recruitment. Los Alamos National Laboratory is a rather unique institution in many ways. Its presence in a small community in the mountains of northern New Mexico results in the largest per capita population of PhD scientists in the world, yet the nearest PhD granting institution, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, is two hours away. We are affiliated with the University of California, but it's a day's travel to get to any of their campuses. Our isolation makes it difficult for us to recruit qualified staff to carry on the basic scientific research we do here, both for civilian research goals and for national security. Obviously, those of us who live here love the setting or we wouldn't be here, but young people need the live contacts that institutions of higher learning supply. Many of us have come to the realization that Los Alamos should move much more strongly into education to fulfill our long-term recruitment needs, and that we should have well-established, well-funded programs in both undergraduate and graduate education, where talented students can perform research and develop long-term relationships with mentors and colleagues. Even high school is not too early to start developing these relationships, and it is with this intent that I hope to continue hosting Earthwatch programs here.
Cathy expressed the sentiment very well. She wrote: "If three people from each of your Earthwatch teams come back as undergraduate students, in a few years you'll never lack help again." I think we would be flattering ourselves unduly to expect that each of our Earthwatch teams would net as many as three dedicated returnees, much as I would like that to happen! Obviously students of such high talent, broad interests, and ambition as yourselves will doubtless find many opportunities open to you in the years to come. Yet just because we've made the effort, surely some of you will remember us with fondness and consider with respect the opportunities we might be able to offer you. I said it before to each of you in person, but let me say again, please look into our student programs when the time comes, and give us the chance to hire you.
Now: about Fenton Hill. You knew that we were unable to perform the originally planned program because of problems regarding the status of the site. You also knew that on the first Thursday of our time together I met with the facilities person to get the excavation permits started for our concrete pad to support our first four permanent telescopes. So things were already starting to move favorably in our direction. Since you've been gone, laboratory management has committed to working things out with the Forest Service, and I've received a verbal okay from the Forest Service (pending their inspection of the site I've marked out) to proceed with the letting of contracts to do the work. The eventual disposition of the site, whether it will be a University of California Research Park managed by INPAC (which I would prefer), or maintained as a lab-leased Forest Service site, is still in question, but either status would permit our activities. The extent to which Earthwatch helped get this moving is not very easy to see, but I know that our activities generated much discussion, and the timing suggests a strong link.
Also, the 10-foot automated ProDome, from Technical Innovations, that will cover the REACT telescope, has arrived. I received it on Wednesday August 13th at Fenton Hill, and put it in the warehouse, where it will stay until the concrete pad is ready for it to be bolted to. I'm told it can be assembled in the warehouse and moved later, so if I had a crew of 8 eager pairs of hands with me now, we would be up there today (Thursday the 14th) assembling it, and starting to play with the Dome Wizard software that makes it work. As it is, I guess we'll wait for the concrete, which should be in place by early October. Any of you want to come back so soon to help?
The development of Fenton Hill, which now looks certain, does not mean that we will neglect the other sites on our list, and therefore continued measurements of seeing at those sites will be needed. While Fenton Hill will certainly be an adequate site for the wide-field telescopes we are presently planning to install, we eventually have ambitions of fielding a large aperture telescope for which very good seeing would be important. Since we plan to run remotely and automated, we should pick sites that are best for science in favor of concentrating all telescopes at a single site. Both Pajarito Peak and Blue Bird Mesa should still be under consideration, therefore, and we will attempt measurements at those sites this fall and next spring. Our Earthwatch program next summer will incorporate those as well as taking data and debugging the telescopes we'll have running on Fenton Hill.