Dammit!

Tonight was supposed to be our first night. So much for that. We went up to the summit to try and get ready around 3pm. In talking with one of the techs, I noticed that the temperature gague was way too high. That means that the CCD's were way too warm. He then looked at the pressure gague and noticed that there was about 10000 times more gas in the dewar than there should have been. Oops. Looks like the vacuum seal was broken. So much for observing tonight. Here's a picture of the wide-field imager with the new "8K" array. This is a 64 megapixel camera (unlike my 6Mpixel digital camera).

Here's a shot of the CCD's inside the dewar taken from the instrument-description paper. The 8K camera is actually a mosaic - 8 smaller CCDs set side by side so that they act as one big one. Each one of the CCD's is 8 million pixels.
This is the UH 2.2m telescope. It's about 40 years old now...... and it shows.

We're trying to look at the Rho-Ophiuchus nebula. Here's a shot from Jeff Ball of the region. It's one of the few star-forming regions up in the summer.
And this is just for fun - the "Boc globules" and "cometary knots" on the edge of the helix nebulae. Basically, as a massive star dies and explodes, the ejected gas and the extreme radiation can wreak havoc on proto-stellar disks around nearby stars. This is what that looks like through Hubble. The "globules" are really just the proto-stars being shredded and blasted by the wind/radiation.