A Maui Day

I flew over to Maui early and caught a really pretty moring sunrise from the airport. I spent the day in the lab & machine shop making parts for the AO system and then moving it around to accommodate a new lens we got to relay the telescope on to the deformable-mirror. More parts came in for HiVIS upgrades so I spent an hour playing with epoxy, piezo's and mirrors. Fun but midly scary.... Funny to think that breaking those toys would cost me several months sallary.

It's nowhere near done, but here's the layout....

Gliding the Ko'olau!

Today was one of the best glides I've had over there. Good god, you can climb at 500ft per minute and not use an engine all day! I love the Grob!

More Color Figures!

I spent several hours playing with orthorgraphic projections. It's actually been a really fun distraction from lab stuff. We've got these models to back-project on to a stellar surface and it's been neat playing with more stellar-surface images.

Color-coded longitudes orthographically projected on to an image plane. Sweet.

And...

Yet another day spent data-reducing and squiggle-plotting. Might I say 'enough already'?

A Long Weekend

I'd love to say I've been having fun, but the last few days have been filled with intense optics activity. On Thursday, I was at the summit testing out the new polarimeter till about 10pm. Friday was spent, again till late, doing a bunch of AO rebuilding. That's getting close... Yesterday and today, I've stayed up on the summit doing a bunch of calibrations. When I'm not playing with optics, I'm reducing data, and of course..... the never ending cycle of plotting.... At least the spectropolarimeter is up and running, has full-Stokes capability and we're ready to go!

HiVIS Rebuilt.... Again!

I have to say, this CIP fund has been awesome. It's like christmas. We've got about 1 million to spend on hardware by summer. Aw, shucks.... Guess I need to get all those toys I've been seeing in the catalogs. It's actually been super nice. We've been able to buy a ton of hardware that makes many things operate a helluva lot better. We had $10k in calcite stuck in the closet. We were able to spend 2k to get it properly coated, aligned and bonded in to a gianormous Savart Plate. We got a spare liquid-crystal driver box, polarizers, rotation stages, mirrors, and all kinds of mounts. It's been pretty sweet. I've even been able to take on an REU student for the summer to build our own AO demonstrator (about $30k). Let the fun begin!

Anyways, I rebuilt the HiVIS polarimeter to have the liquid-crystals as well as the achromatic wave plates both interchangable with the new giant Savart. It's up to the summit today... After a few hours sleep anyways.

Adaptive Optics Spacers!

I'm on Maui for the week. Again. But I got to have some fun in the machine shop. The machine guys have been busy for the last few weeks so I got a "tutorial" to get me going on my own. Fingers crossed I'll still have fingers by the end of this. I learned how to cut, trim, straighten, drill and tap on metal plates. I have done this stuff before, but not with the big machines we've got over here. I spent the day making 'spacers' so that all the AO hardware has the same beam-height. Now we get to put this thing back together and see how well I did. That was a fun day of metal-shard-covered-hands.

The Birds

This giant flock of birds came in and I got them with the teleconverter. Pretty sweet....

Kualoa 2

So, in an effort to get some solitude, Isar, Heather and I walked to essentially the end of the beach, way past the Kualoa park area. It was spectacular. And the day was sunny, warm and mostly cloud free. Some "firsties" came down to hang for a few hours in the second part of the day - we caught a moon-set and then got 5 plates of ribs, rice and sausage from our neighbor. At this point, the weather started changing and I decided that my nice quiet home on the north shore was more quiet and serene then camping next to a generator with music playing at all hours with drunken outbursts.... At least there were many good hours mixed in with that decision.

Heather and I spent Monday flying (no pics though) and making spreadsheets.... Apparently, TerraPAC has "grossed" about $12,000 in rides in the plane since November. It's been a busy few months...
Crab!

We spent several hours playing "stick ball" with Milo seeds and driftwood, then taking pictures of flying coconuts....


Isar "swimming". Not much water in a shallow bay like this...
Moonset!

Kualoa!

I went camping for the weekend with Heather to try and get some good peace and quiet. This almost worked, except for the good-hearted but crazy-perma-drunk "feed-da-werl" guy camping next to us. It was a strange weekend - the weather was beautiful and basically everything cooperated wonderfully, save always having a drooling drunk guy giving us food. He was being really nice about it, and seemed totally benign, but I had wanted some peace and quiet... Either way, the stars on the beach were fabulous. Jenny and Joe were there until noon then Isar came out for the evening. The sky was perfectly clear and we went crab catching.

Maui, Maui, Always Maui....

Yet another week has gone by on Maui. I've lived essentially in the lab or my office with short trips to the farm-house for sleep. One night sort of fits my feeling for the week - Christian and I were up till ~1am, having imbibed several Gin & Tonic's. We were feeling a little happy and were laughing more but still trying to work out how to include quantum-efficiency-dependence in the demodulation matrix for an over-specified system of coupled equations caused by wavelength-dependent birefringence from liquid-crystals. It's been an interesting week. Looking forward to sleeping on the beach this weekend....

The most insulting bio I've heard....

I just got a 'draft' of my bio from our publications lady. I'm not exactly sure what the intent was, but it's about the most ignorant and insulting bio I've had a co-worker put together. As a team player, you're supposed to highlight the positive and talk about what a person does. Perhaps you'd mention accomplishments or other activities I've done. It's up to interpretation, but it can be read in a very ridiculous manner:

David Harrington received his PhD from UH in 2008, and instead of moving on to a new venue, he has stayed as a postdoctoral fellow to continue his work on spectropolarimetry of young disk stars with Jeff Kuhn. Spectropolarimetry enables scientists to measure the polarization of light from stars and other celestial objects more precisely than is possible with a regular polarimeter. Spectropolarimetry is used to measure stars' magnetic fields and to investigate the origin of spectral lines.

To academics and anybody who knows english it implies:

David Harrington got his PhD here but couldn't find another job because he's lazy and stayed on with a sympathetic old boss doing the same old thing because he couldn't think of anything creative to do. Spectropolarimetry is a bit better than polarimetry because the name is longer, though we're not going to say anything more than that and apparently he does something with it, though we're not going to say what he does. It can be used to measure magnetic fields an other things, but we're not going to mention what he actually did with it, nor that he built it. We're not going to mention anything else that anybody at the IfA would know about like publications, other fields he works in, or anything that is on the website that I (the publications lady) know about. We're not going to say he graduated a year early or mention that he's been invited to work all over the world or say anything about all the functions we know he's done. We'll just end without a punchline, just like him.

Any person with a brain would know that you don't introduce a person like that. You could write something a lot stonger and much more positive for the public to read:

David Harrington received his PhD a year early from UH in 2008 but stayed on as a postdoctoral fellow to make use of the excellent observatories this state offers. In addition to continuing to develop linear spectropolarimetry as a tool for imaging circumstellar environments, he has joined programs in adaptive optics, stellar magnetic fields and solar coronal imaging. Being interested in unique instrumentation and new capabilities for the worlds best observatories, he is working with many IfA Manoa and Maui faculty on several projects. There are only two high-resolution spectropolarimeters on large telescopes in the world, both in Hawaii, one built for his PhD. In addition to upgrading one for use in measuring stellar magnetic fields, he is helping to adapt the worlds largest curvature adaptive optics system for use with this high resolution spectropolarimeter, participating in solar eclipse coronal observations and improving the SolarC coronagraphic imaging spectropolarimeter. These instruments will enable new investigations of the near-star environment, stellar magnetism, solar corona and are useful for many other applications. In addition to instrumentation, he is an instructor for the Center for Adaptive Optics summer school in Santa Cruz, an Akamai Maui Short Course lead instructor and hosts visiting grad students and summer interns in instrumentation as well as solar and stellar observation.

Or you could just keep it simple:

David Harrington received his PhD from UH in 2008 but stayed on as a postdoctoral fellow to make use of Hawaii's world class observatories. In addition to continuing to develop linear spectropolarimetry as a tool for imaging circumstellar environments, he has joined programs in adaptive optics, stellar magnetic fields and solar coronal imaging. His projects include an upgrade to a spectropolarimeter for use in measuring stellar magnetic fields, helping to adapt the worlds largest curvature adaptive optics system for use with this high resolution spectropolarimeter and working with solar coronal instrumentation. These instruments will enable new investigations of the near-star environment, stellar magnetism, solar corona and are useful for many other applications. He is an instructor for the Center for Adaptive Optics summer school, an Akamai Maui Short Course lead instructor and works with visiting grad students and summer interns in the summer.

God damn. Or even just re-word it to be less insulting.

David Harrington received his PhD from UH in 2008, and stayed as a postdoctoral fellow. He will continue to work with spectropolarimetry of young disk stars with Jeff Kuhn. He also will be using this technique to measure stars' magnetic fields.

I didn't expect a PR department to warn a potential victim of sabbotage, or maybe they just assume I'm an academic and don't know english... Shouldn't she just have published it and then Molotov-coctailed my office?

(Sean - that was for you).

Pilot!

After a 9 hour ordeal, I'm a pilot. Good god that was painful. At least now I can fly with people....

Big Flying Day

My check-ride is tomorrow. And it really seems like things are going to cooperate this time. I just got back from a "dual" flight with Steve to Kauai and then I went solo over to Molokai. That's over 4 hours of over-water flying today. I've covered some ground! And I think that the paperwork is all done. That's really what it's all about. Paperwork. Are all the proper forms filled out the proper way and signed by the proper people so this can happen... I don't know if it really has much to do with my flying ability.... We'll see. T-12 hours.

Maui Time

Christian is visiting from Zurich - I didn't have too much notice, but it's time for some polarimetry! I'll be on Maui a ton.... But at least things will be getting accomplished.

More Critters

On a super-bowl sunday....