It's a PLANET!!!

Holy crap. We just found a planet (Mars) and perhaps might do something useful since we know where we're looking finally. The thing is so damn bright that it's about time we found it. Someone should really keep this telescope working. The pointing was off by about 10x it's field of view (so that we would have had to take a tile of 100 exposures with the other project just to search the possible area.....)

So here it is, a planet. Yup, that dot. Great. Fabulous. Was this dot really worth staying up for 4 nights......

So, then we zoomed in on the dot. Finally, it's a dot in the middle of the picture . Even better. Nobel Prize..... doubt it. At least we can tell the staff that we really weren't kidding when we said that their telescope wasn't pointing well, and no, it's not that we're just stupid and don't know what a dot looks like. This week was full of enough frustration and computer bull-shit that I think I'll take the next week off. Oh, and now that we have it working, the weather is about 3 times worse than last night meaning we can't really see anything tonight anyways. Where's my whiskey. I'm going to bed.

I hope this is an insightful look into the daily life of a grad student. Not what one would expect.

To redeem this fairly bitchy post, here's something I snagged from the CSO recent results page. It's a map of a super nova remnant. To be honest, this instrument is really cool and if the weather is good, it can do some pretty good stuff, but you had better be intimate with it. Sleeping with it on a daily basis and wiping it's ass for it intimate.