A Night Reducing Data.

All the fun plots..... after a working evening.

Tsunami Cooking Madness

The "Tsunami Day" was an interesting one. I got emails around 11pm Friday that a warning was on. I had been hanging out with Eva and Steve at a Waikiki bar and Steve ended up leaving his car in Waikiki and crashed at my place. 6am Saturday morning, the sirens start their hourly cadence. We all wake up and do the 'command post' thing watching news and fielding all the frantic phone calls from the mainland. I swear they panic way more than we do.

It takes us half an hour to decide that we'll be fine and have what we need for a good couple weeks 'back country'. Eva comes up from Waikiki since she's near the evac zone. We all drive in to Waikiki to grab Steves car. It was my first time seeing cars line up at a gas station.... Either way, people were out doing their morning exercise or walking around with coffee so it didn't seem like that big of a deal in an odd way. I mean, having hours of warning gives you lots of time to prepare for things so it was an odd experience. The grocery stores were slammed but a lot of people still did their morning exercise. Eva and I napped for the next few hours while Steve facebooked and Mikey did what Mikey does. I woke up a bit before it was supposed to start. We ended up watching this webcast for half an hour (replayed timelapsed on youtube). Once it looked like it wasn't going to do much, we went for a run to Manoa falls and cooked a wicked pasta.

Overall, there was plenty of warning, roads were clear, there wasn't much traffic, people chilled out and went to the lookouts with cameras, and Billy even told me that there were people drag-racing on the open north shore streets since there weren't any cars (cops or traffic). Sounds like the North Shore. It was about the most coordinated emergency situation I could imagine.

Mikey teaching us how to not kill basil.
Run Mikey Run!

Fuzzball?

I spent the day working with fuzzballs.... but the new detector is basically ready to go to the summit. Good stuff.

Observing & Mountain Time

Mountain time is always full of caffeine and multi-tasking. I came up Monday and am headed down in a few hours (it's 3am Wednesday morning). Lots of LoVIS calibrations, HiVIS observations, and some good news. I got the proofs from PASP for the demodulation paper. And... it looks like I will get my first "official" college teaching experience this summer. I've got to fill out 'new hire' docs for MCC to be the ETRO 293V instructor for the upcoming Akamai Maui Short Course. Very cool.

Redoing Web Page

I was up on the mountain calibrating all day and observing till 4am. Plenty of time for data reduction and picture processing.

I redid my front page to have 300 new pictures....

And the publications page...

I've added UCSC and Tahoe pics too.

It was a lot of fun going through old pictures and finding the good ones.

Totality! Eclipse Chasers...

There's a website compiling solar eclipse expedition stories and I guess my blog made it out in the world.... Go figure. Check out the website: Eclipse-Chasers.com

A Web-Design Sunday

I spent the day hiding out in Waiakoa working on a HiVIS website for the IfA Maui page. Lots of web redesign is going on for the IfA site.... It's nice to finally have cool images to post officially.

Near IR Shots of Tahoe

Love the contrast....

Observing Shuttle Bay Lights

I just had one of the more random observing nights. Bizarre.

So.... we're tracking the shuttle (which was attached to the space station). The astronauts were doing some stuff with the shuttle that we were supposed to see. When we first saw them pop up over the horizon, the whole thing looked unusually bright so I took a shot before it went dark. Very confusing - the spectrum looked like a fluorescent light bulb. Not at all what we were expecting.

At this point, I thought, well, WTF? I didn't see anything afterwards so the rest of the run was a disappointment. So, you know, maybe the space station left the porch lights on right? We called NASA who was coordinating this stuff with the shuttle. Turns out they had the bay open with the lights on. They didn't know what kind of lights they had. I think I can say they've got some fluorescents.

What was the point of all that?

I'm driving down the mountain and going to bed.

Charge Shuffle!

Got the charge shuffling to work on the new detector. And it works with the software control. Hot damn, we're rolling!

Climbing the Panther

My first 'real' outdoors bouldering experience. Good times.

Emerald Bay & Cascade Falls, Tahoe

Leaving civilization for a desolate, lonely place....