A Day to Play

We dropped off Ryan, Mark and Sonnett at the airport, then headed to the I'ao Needle. Meghan and Nathan are two "REU's" here on Maui for the summer. We all went to the needle to walk around. Sonnett had to fly back to Honolulu and we then headed up to the cloud forest at Polipoli. Now it's night-time geek-time again. I can finally get back to all those quiggles I was supposed to be working with....

Baldwin!
Up in the cloud forest.

Last Day!!!

Thank god it's over. Damn. Today was a long day. This day was the adaptive optics day. It went off decently. There were some hiccups, but I think it went ok. There was a final celebration day dinner but then we did a big 2hr debreif till about 10pm. Everybody went up and we dove in to some good bottles.... It was a wonderful but very busy week.

Geek Nights

Here's how all us geeks look at night. Everybody behind their laptops. At least Isar and I had a break to smoke a stogie and drink some whiskey out in the parking lot.

Summit Day

Today, all the interns went up to the summit. I led the tour of some of the UH facilities and got to sit on the optical bench on AEOS and explain my research to them. It was good fun.

Ryans Slush

We froze a bottle of wine. Whoops. Ryan decided to mash up some strawberries with a fork and mix the slush-wine with the mash-berries. It was a good time. I think the night-time hangout is the highlight of my day. The teaching has been going really well, but it's been totally exhausting. I'm wiped out...

Teaching Day 2

Day two - a whole bunch of inquiries. This was a busy day...

Akamai Short Course Day 1

It went really well. I was more on the sideline today since I wasn't running the talks or activities. It was still a really long day...


Isar fell asleep on the floor. We took embarassing pictures of him with every alcohol bottle we could find...
Computer party! Only geeks right?

EPOD!

I've got an EPOD today! The lunar corona picture made it.

The AO Bench!

Here's the AO bench - light comes in from the top right. There's a laser and a slide projector that make up the sky and "guide-star". The first knobby post is the aberrator. The two smaller lenses before the blue thing is "the telescope". The blue thing in the upper left is the deformable mirror. The light bounces off that toward the middle of the image. The next two lenses focus the light through the beamsplitter (glass) on to the "science camera" in the middle. The beamsplitter also sends 50% of the light down toward the lower left. That part is the wavefront sensor. The first lens collimates the light onto a lenslet array (knobby thing). The lenslets make a bunch of spots on the camera in the lower left.

The software that runs the setup does a few steps. You find the spots and then the software pulls on the deformable mirror to measure how the spots remove as the mirror responds....


Then there is display software to show how the shape of the deformable mirror as the system is correcting the optics.

Another Prep Day

Today was spent finishing off the prep work for the internship. We did runthroughs of all the stations for all the days and tried to debug everything. It was really great to have the prep time. The short course was kicked off with a talk by Kalei Tsuha on the sacredness of Haleakala and then a big dinner with all 15 interns.



Ryan didn't go run in the morning and had some energy to get out....

AO Bench Prep Day

Today was a pretty frustrating and totally worthwhile day. We came over two days before the workshop (memorial weekend... bummer) to prepare for this thing and we needed every minute of it. Today was spent setting up the stations. My main station was totally off and I had to spend the morning aligning and fixing the adaptive-optics demonstration table (AO Bench). We also set up the other adaptive optics activities.

Hale Waiakoa (the farmhouse where we're staying) with Isar and Mark in the kitchen, Sonnett and Markus 2 in the "dining room".
Walking to the car... Look how big our bags are...
Ryan and Isar preping the "box-heads" - put these on your head and walk around with a pinhole-camera image projected on a screen in front of your eyes. Good fun.
Mark and Sonnett next to the "bendy mirror" station setup.

Flying to Maui

On a beautiful day....

Ryan picked me up and we went straight to Costco and bought a bunch of food. After a quick dinner in Makawao, we picked up Sonnett and Mark and unpacked in Waiakoa. I ran down and got Isar from the airport and we all promptly passed out.

Carly's last days, Squiggles, Off to Maui

The last few days have been a blur, partly due to lack of sleep and excessive squiggling. Tuesday was a day spent hanging out over at Rahul's place. Carly wanted to see Rahul again before she left as well as get some TV time in.... It was a good day. We hit up Buzz's and played racket ball. Then I worked for several hours while Carly and Rahul enjoyed "the box"...






On Wed, Carly wanted to do some last-day shopping. It was a super nasty day out.... We took a load of stuff up to my new apartment and then stopped by Haleiwa and "Koz-ko". Then the squiggles began. I stayed up all night reading. plotting, making figures and tables and writing. I drove Carly to the airport and dropped her off. It was sad to see her go... I went to the office and caught a 2hr nap on the couch, then kept working. Same thing this morning. It's been a lot of time behind the laptop.... I'm off to the airport in an hour to start the Akamai Short Course madness...

Most of my waking life is spent like this, although a lot of the time there's no shorts. Why wear them at home?

Death by squiggles!

A Work Day...

We all had to get up f-off early to drop off Jesse at the airport. Carly and I slept late, ran for an hour and then I worked till late. She got to run around Waikiki. It was actually really nice to catch up on sleep and exercise, although this was a really strange day all-up...

I'm getting ready to teach at the Akamai Maui short course. I fly over Friday and several of us are teaching a week long optics/engineering course. I've spent a bunch of time in teleconferences and organizing the activities and talks. It's been fun to be involved in this stuff...