Mt. Wilson 150-Foot Solar Tower webcam

(9:20am Munich time, 12:20am LA time) The “Station Fire” continues to encroach upon the summit of Mount Wilson, home to the modern CHARA Array operated by GSU, the historic 60″ and 100″ telescopes, solar observatories, and a number of other historic structures.  Also of significant interest at the summit of Mt. Wilson is an array of communications towers, for local television & radio stations, cell phone providers, and US Government agencies such as CIA, FBI, and the Secret Service.  This fire thus far has unfortunately claimed the lives of two firefighters, with hundreds more still under extreme risk in continuing to fight the blaze; over 100,000 acres of mountainous brush has burned to date.

For astronomers, this crisis brings to mind the dreadful Mt. Stromlo fire that destroyed much of the Mt. Stromlo Observatory near Canberra in January of 2003.

For reference here is one stop shopping for up-to-date, online Mt. Wilson information:

• LA Times Google map of the fire - shows the current extent of the fire with a clickable map
• LA Times current updates - minute-by-minute updates
• Mount Wilson Webcam - mounted on the 150-foot solar tower; please access sparingly as this server is frequently overloaded right now (probably the most famous webcam in the world right now…)
• Mount Wilson Observatory - regular updates from Director Hal McAlister (with alternate site in case the server atop the summit goes down due to power interruption)
• Sky & Telescopes updates

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So one thing that is a substantial part of many astronomers’ lives is travel.  Travel to observatories, to visit colleagues, to meetings.  And believe me, astronomers know how to create meetings: meeting to talk about telescope designs, meetings to select telescope observing proposals, meetings to talk about telescope results.

At the Extreme Solar Systems meeting in Santorini, Greece

A lot of my non-astronomer friends think this is very exotic - jet setting off to remote reaches of the globe to commune with the far reaches of nature or members of the intellectual elite¹.  And, after a fashion, it can be - locations of telescopes tend to be extreme; meetings can end up being held at truly picturesque settings.  Yet, for every sunset in Tahiti I’ve seen because of an astronomy meeting (zero, actually) I can think of a dozen (or 30, actually) musty motel rooms in some strip mall outside Cleveland that smell of a persistent violation of its “no smoking” placards and have distressing growths in the corners of the bathroom.

Also, it’s peculiar how the term ‘jet set’ seems blissfully divorced from the actual modern experience of jet travel.  One thing should be crystal clear: astronomers don’t get business class tickets bought for them - it’s economy all the way, baby, whether it is the one hour between San Francisco and LA, or the 14 between Paris and Santiago.  If you’re lucky you can get an exit row seat, but usually you’re pretzeled into some seat watching re-runs of “Mr. Deeds” on some distant, old tube TV that seems to have its color balance shot.

So my most recent trip did nothing but add insult to injury - or perhaps more accurately, injury to insult.  I was coming from Munich to Santiago, for some meetings in Santiago that will be followed by a conference in the area as well.  The journey involves a plane change in Sao Paolo, with a ’short’ ~4 hour flight then on to Santiago.  On that flight, about halfway to Santiago, we hit turbulence.

Now turbulence is not something that makes me squeamish - though I’m of course sympathetic that few people share that placid attitude towards the bump-and-shake of some moderately unstable air.  Growing up in Seattle, you see on childhood tours of the Boeing plant the torture rigs they build for accelerated lifecycle testing of aircraft where a plane, held in its entirety in a giant steel right, has its wings repeatedly pushed and pulled up and down, over and over, to simulate years of life quickly.  The real kicker is that, at the end of over 40 years of simulated life, they test to failure - and the wings easily head toward a full 90 degree angle before breaking.  So structural integrity has never worried me.

But this was turbulence of a kind that I, in over 15 years of sustained astronomer travel, had never seen.  We’re talking anything-not-tied-down-hits-ceiling turbulence; sustained negative G’s turbulence; damage to aircraft interior turbulence.  Broken bone turbulence (ok, a pinky, but broken nonetheless).  Pretty amazing stuff - fortunately I had my seatbelt on, and it strained mildly to keep me in my seat as I rose off of it.  More fortunately, a meal had just been served - hear me out on this:  it made for a tremendous mess, but at the same time, most everyone was seated because of it, and people were even by and large wearing their seat belts.

A big fat mess after the turbuluence tossed us around

We ended up with trays and eggs and tomatoes and yogurt on the floor (the meal service had been breakfast - my orange juice was a particular decorative addition to my attire) and a large number of older Chilean women praying loudly.  Our flight crew - at least one of which had the aforementioned broken pinky - were clearly surprised as well but quickly and professionally worked to calm the passengers and clean up the aftermath.

So anyway, yes, its true - there can be the exotic travel to remote parts of the globe.  But it can be pretty damn messy, too.

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¹“Elite” is, unfortunately, a term that has denigrated a bit over the years into pejorative connotations.  I rather like it myself, since I find its use in reference to scientists is one that is rooted in meritocratic values.

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A self-portrait of Kaspar and Gerard

I had a visit today from my friend Kaspar, who I’ve known since he came to work with me at my last job back in the States.  He’s a tremendously enjoyable person to hang out with, and a great scientist as well, so we got a lot of things done and had fun at the same time.  As with any job, having good people to work with makes all the difference:  you could be digging ditches in the middle of summer in Dodge City, Nebraska¹, and it would be just fine if your co-workers could put a smile on your face.

Most any job will have those sorts of people - and most any job can have people who will have you rethinking your aversion to mortal sin, too - but I think working in astronomy there’s slightly more of the truly enjoyable type.  Why?  Perhaps its a bit of self-centered optimism, or some romantic notion that the purity of astronomy attracts the pure of heart (whatever that means).  But there could be a bit of a selection effect: most of us in astronomy are here because we chose to be here - generally speaking those in the field tend to be quite talented and could succeed elsewhere if they chose (and generally make more doing so, too).  Being in the field because we want to be here makes a big difference, I think.  (Of course, we have our fair share of individuals who validate the Peter Principle - or, more significantly, the Dilbert Principle - but such is life an any organization.)

A temperature map of the extrasolar planet orbiting HD189733. Temperatures and other aspects of such planets are directly driven by the characteristics of their host stars.

Anyway, Kaspar and I reviewed some work we’re doing on measuring the sizes, temperatures, and masses of stars that are known to host planets.  We then went off to a lovely lunch (an Italian place in Dirnismaning featuring this great American Western decor - makes you think Clint Eastwood is going to wander in at any moment), and then wrapped up the afternoon with some more work.  A nice day, all in all (it beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick)!

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¹My apologies if you live there.

A common, romantic notion that the public has of astronomers is that we stay up all night, peering  through an eyepiece protruding from the back end of some massive behemoth of glass and steel.  In reality, astronomers stay up all night, basking in the warm glow of computer screens that report the status of electronic cameras, attached to the back end of a massive behemoth of glass and steel.

In the control room for the VLTI - more monitors than you could shake a stick at

You see, the human eye is great and all - it’s quite a marvelous piece of optical engineering, from the lens to the detector - but it’s got a few drawbacks¹.  For one, it’s not terribly sensitive - on average, it detects about 1% of the photons that enter the eyeball.  Modern photoelectric detectors - essentially light-sensitive computer chips - do between 40 and 80%, depending on the particular type one choses.  (Film cameras ran about 4% at best, which is why the shift was made to electronic devices.)  More importantly, you can’t directly digitize and copy what your eye sees - one’s discoveries are hard (but not impossible) to share with your colleagues.

Plus, as the observing night wears on .. and on … and on … those eyes tend to get a little bleary.  It’s from staring at all those LCD screens².  We’ve come a long ways from green phosphor monochrome monitors displaying only text (don’t betray your age by revealing you know what I’m talking about³) but one’s eyes still get a little droopy as you get towards the end of the night.  As I type this, it’s around 430am, and I am *so* ready to be done: kicking over onto a night schedule (plus 4 time zones, having come from Europe to Chile) is always difficult.  We have about another hour until sun-up, and then we’re off to the Residencia for a quick swim and then bedtime.  Whew!

¹Still, you can go a long ways if you have Betty Davis Eyes
²Reporting important information - delay line position, tracking telemetry, Facebook account notifications, the latest news on slashdot
³We splurged on my first computer, an Apple ][+ (with a lowly 5-digit serial number, thank you), and actually got a color TV screen which we fed with an RF modulator

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Four little telescopes, all in a row

So I am, once again, at the Paranal Observatory, observing with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).  VLTI uses multiple telescopes to synthesize a single, larger telescope - one of a size that is far beyond what is practical to build by itself.  For example, we are able to configure our telescopes to act like a telescope more than 100-m in diameter - something that would be nice to have but is not economically feasible.

We are in the process of commissioning a new instrument for VLTI called PRIMA - I’ll save you the pain of what the acronym means and cut to the practical impact of it: PRIMA allows us to observe two objects simultaneously.  It effectively lets the VLTI behave like an interferometer, times two.  This setup lets us do a couple of tricks - first, it will allow us to look at things fainter than we normally can, by using one of the two channels to lock up the optics on a bright star, while the second channel stares at something dim.  Second, PRIMA will let us measure the angle between those two objects to an unprecedented level of accuracy, something south of 100 microarcseconds.

Twilight - getting ready to go onto the sky and observe.

Hmmm… a microarcsecond: this is a pretty daunting science-type term.  How small is such a measure?  Well, let’s put it this way: if you & your friend are standing on opposite sides of a soccer pitch (or football field) - about 100 meters - it’s the angle subtended by the apparent distance that one of his hairs grows in a second, as viewed by you.

Pretty cool, huh?  But here’s the catch: VLTI is a rather complicated beast, and PRIMA makes it all that much worse.  So, we shipped PRIMA out to the site last August, and we’ve been working to get it functioning ever since.  It’d been expected that there would be an extended period of commissioning to shake out all the bugs (think of it as a test flight regime for a new aircraft), but some times the observing runs associated with commissioning can be a challenge when new & exciting optomechanical system do new & exciting - and unexpected - things.  So at times we’re left scratching our heads.  (”Huh?  The star separator did what?”)

Venus and the Moon in conjunction over Paranal

This particular observing run has been like that. We fix one thing and something else breaks or misbehaves. It’s currently day 4 of 10 - and things overall are only getting better - but it’s turning into a long haul. We’ll be ready for the bus in a week! However, as we like to say (and first attributed to Albert Einstein), if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be research…

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Separated at birth? The ESO Auxiliary Telescopes bear a striking resemblance ...

... to Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Working in the field of astronomy, there are many and wondrous things that one often encounters during the course of one’s travels. In many cases, the sights are sufficiently novel as to leave one scrambling to place them in context in an inadequately rich cultural backdrop. This is, of course, ever-so-true for the images that astronomers pluck out of the sky each and every day.

Telescopes are often located at the very extremes of the earth (and beyond). These locations are generally selected for environments that are as benign as possible - but not from the point of view of their human operators: these considerations are purely driven by the needs of the machines. Locales that are very dry, cold, and high atop mountains figure prominently on the wish list for sites for observatories. These locations often have staggering vistas associated with them - stark landscapes that seem to have been ripped off the surface of the moon, rather than having anything to do with Mother Earth.

And finally, the telescopes themselves often defy convenient categorization, being objects of purpose-built wonderment that have lines that curve and swoop in unfamiliar ways. These machines are often reflections of their times (for example, the 100″ Hooker telescope looks a lot like other large things of its era - battleships!) - the fingerprints of the technologies out of which they were born are all over them, even if they themselves look nothing like the more conventional applications of that technology. Think of what would have happened if Andy Warhol had been locked in a Dunkin’ Donuts kitchen and told produce some art. It’d be something wacky & cool & unexpected, but you know it’d have a certain familiarity because it’d be deep fried and covered in powdered sugar, too.

Having recently come back to ESO’s Paranal Observatory to use the VLTI, I sometimes reflect upon these things as I wander around outside on the observing deck. On the deck are the 4 outsized domes for the UTs (the cleverly named ‘Unit Telescopes’), the VLTI building, and the 4 AT telescopes (the also cleverly named ‘Auxiliary Telescopes’). The ATs are specifically designed to be used with the VLTI, and as such, rank high on my list of personally important astronomical glass. The ATs are interesting little telescopes¹, designed to be compact and can even be driven around like futuristic street cars. The flat white finish could easily have been designed by Apple, like some outsized iPod (is it too late to trademark the term iTelescope?), but recently I have discovered an even closer cultural link for them.

It’s something that nagged at me for some time - that “I’ve seen this before” feeling that I couldn’t put my finger on. And then it hit me: the ATs could easily be mistaken for Marvin, the oppressively depressed robot from Douglas Adam’s ever-so-delightful Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (at least, the movie version). The resemblance is striking - so much so, it gives me pause: did any of the film’s producers visit Paranal before filming? Where did that Marvin design come from, anyway? And using Alan Rickman’s voice in the movie for Marvin - it’s just like when Rickman was in Die Hard, and they blow up the place, which of course is what happened to Paranal in Quantum of Solace. Coincidence? I think not.

¹“Little” being a relative term - at 1.8m (71″) in size, they’re small only next to the 8.2m UTs.

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The ESO espresso machine - its glittering towers of beans and chocolate sitting idle, quietly mocking all that come to it for intellectual energy.

Wow, talk about an alarmist headline.  But it’s true!  Why?  There is a machine at ESO, a magic machine, one that single-handedly fuels the engine of astronomical discovery.  I have often remarked that it is the single most important machine at the facility.  What is it?  Tucked away in the heart of the ESO cafeteria, sitting atop a shiny stainless steel countertop that has been devoted to it alone, like an altar, is the ESO espresso machine.

Its sheer size and glittering controls are sure to elicit a mouth-dropping expression of wonderment from the newcomer.  ESO veterans know to make a beeline every morn immediately upon arrival at work for this cathedral of caffeination and pay homage to its wondrous powers of brewing and steaming.  Wizened oldtimers of the institute remark that its prodigious mind-enhancing output - estimated to be well in excess of 30,000 cups of black, liquid lightning a year - has led to more discoveries than any comparable device in the modern world.

But alas, this morning, a mournful sign hung like a rude stoplight on the front of the machine.  “Out of order,” was its tale of woe.  Progress today at ESO?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps the ephemeral mysteries of the universe will hide yet one more day behind the mists of uncertainty, with no minds coffee-sharpened like razors to cut away at the fog that hides discovery.  But, “a technician has been called”, the sign goes on to read - so there is hope for yet more insight will eventually come in seeking the secrets of the universe…

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The heart of the PRIMA instrument, one of its beam combiners.

Yes kids, here I am today, digging away in search of the next Rosetta Stone that will explain the latest round of interstellar mysteries, slogging it out with … Microsoft Project?

The Kepler field of view, straddling the short arm of the Summer Triangle (Vega, Deneb, and Altair).

On March 6th, at 3:48 UTC, a Delta II launch vehicle will rise off the ground at Cape Canaveral’s pad 17B, riding a fountain of fire being belched from its RS-27A main engine and 6 GEM-40 solids strapped to its sides like oversized fireworks.  Three additional GEM-40 solid rockets get an air start about 2 minutes into flight, and burns of the Delta K second stage and Star 48B third stage will loft the Kepler spacecraft into an orbit around the sun, drifting away from the Earth at slow rate over the following years.  After the roaring earthquake-in-a-thunderstorm ride to that orbit, Kepler will settle into the deep interplanetary quiet - an ever waking, watchful sentinel, on the lookout.

During its long stare, Kepler will seek - and find - planets like Earth: the size of Earth, orbiting stars similar to our Sun, separated from their host stars at distances similar to the Earth-Sun system.  Places where liquid water are thought to be likely, where life can flourish.  Terra Nova.

Kepler will do so by looking with its large, unblinking eye, at a huge, heavenly (literally) host of stars - initially, about 200 thousand - taking a digital picture and measuring the brightness of each of those stars once every few minutes.  The exact same field of stars, for 4 long years (and even longer if a mission extension comes to pass).  If one of those stars happens to be Sun-like, if it happens to have an Earth-like planet, if that planet happens to be in a Earth-like orbit (about 93 million miles from its host star), if that orbit happens to pass between us and that star, and if Kepler is looking during the transit event, then a detection might occur.  Stare long enough, the planet’s orbit will swing it around for a second transit, establishing the duration of the orbit - and then later, a third: confirmation.  A lot of if’s - and the mission design attempt to solve that: look at a lot of stars, with a regular rate, for a very long time - four years or more, in fact.  Each one of the “if’s” I mentioned has a small likelihood of success associated with it, but if you beat enough targets, for long enough, against those small probabilities, one can still come up with non-zero discovery rates.

Assuming the rocket doesn’t blow up on launch (yet another ‘if’ - but the Delta II’s are about as resoundingly reliable as they come), and if the satellite functions properly, what is the expected haul of planets?  This is difficult to say, actually - astronomers don’t have much information on how common Earth-like planets are - this is a major motivation for the mission.  But, if current models are true (they are, every blue moon), the expectation is that roughly 50 Earth-like objects will be found, in addition to a large number of bigger objects (such as Neptune-sized objects).

Currently there’s a similar smaller scale mission, CoRoT, flown by the French space agency CNES, which in turn was predated by an even smaller scale mission, MOST, flown by the Canadian Space Agency.  CoRoT just celebrated its 2nd year anniversary, and MOST has been orbiting since mid-2003.  Both CoRoT and MOST can detect large-ish planets (giant gas bags like Neptune and Jupiter) - particularly if the host star is smaller than our sun - but Kepler’s scope (roughly a factor of 10 larger than CoRoT) allowed it to be designed specficially for the goal of finding distinctly Earth-like planets.  It’s an exciting prospect - one more step on the Copernican Revolution started over 400 years ago, one that will not only expand the frontiers of our scientific knowledge, but one that will distinctly impact humanity’s sense of its place in the universe.

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Methane release on Mars in its northern hemisphere during the Martian summer (photo credit: M. Mumma/NASA Goddard)

In some fashion, that is - the planet Mars appears to be ‘alive’.  How can astronomers say that?  Well, recent measurements that indicated the presence of methane in Mars’ atmosphere are key.  Astronomers have been hot on the tail of such evidence for about the past ten years, and the picture is starting to come into focus.  Mars appears to not only show evidence of of methane in its atmosphere, but recent findings indicate that it is concentrated in specific regions on the planet.

Methane’s presence on Mars is interesting: there are a variety of processes¹ present in the Martian atmosphere that quickly destroy it, so something must be replenishing it.  The two leading contenders are geology and biology.  The geologic explanation is that trapped underground methane gas is leaking out, causing the gas to appear.  The more interesting biological explanation of ‘life’ is that microorganisms, possibly underground, are munching away on hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and releasing the gas.  Scientists have evidence for similar organisms that existed on Earth as one of the earliest forms of life, and continues to thrive in exotic locations on Earth.  In either the geologic or biologic case, Mars appears to be a dynamic planet after some fashion - alive!

All in all this is a very interesting discovery, and one that must be met calmly and cooly, embracing the full scope the possible solutions.  The investigators (some of whom I know personally) are all very careful and conscientious, and formidable intellects to boot.  Unfortunately, there are more hysterical reactions in the press - but, I’ll take that as an encouraging sign of continuing, unbridled enthusiasm in astronomy and “what’s out there”.  Hey, it makes for job security…!

(NB.  The actual paper, to appear in Science, is available for download as a PDF.)

¹Photolysis in upper atmosphere (methane+UV photons = methyl+hydrogen), oxidation in the lower atmosphere (oxygen+methane = formaldehyde), electrochemistry near & below surface (hydrogen peroxide+methane = carbon dioxide/methanol/formaldehyde

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