Blue Collar Scientist

Today has been a light bog day¹, because I’ve been packing to prepare for a business trip to Arizona (Tucson and Sierra Vista areas, if there are any readers in those localities who might want to speak up).

Business trips for me involve going to warm climates, then driving up to cold mountaintops, where there is unending natural beauty, and dark skies affording me glorious views of the night sky. This time I will only be spending one night on a mountaintop, and a week at a quaintly-named privately-owned research facility: Junk Bond Observatory (see here, here, here - this last one is very out of date). It isn’t on a mountaintop and the nighttime lows should be tolerably in the 40’s F, instead of unpleasantly cold at altitude.

The place is owned by David Healy, the Grand Master of astro-imaging, having been doing the sport since the early 1970’s. Some of his images are published in the seminal Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, and today he’s a Contributing Editor at Astronomy magazine, and runs two to three telescopes on the facility mainly for research purposes (he has quite a lot of peer reviewed research published).

I supply some of the software that makes this all possible, and this week, JBO gets a major upgrade in capability. I also have to do a little mechanical work on the telescope and the dome. If you all are real good, I might post some video while I’m down there, maybe show you around the place and look at what it is like behind the scenes at a privately-funded, state of the art (mostly) research observatory.

One of my goals while I’m down there is doing a repeat of last year’s attempt at an all-sky, all-night time lapse, this time including the rise of the summer milky way at the end of the night, and featuring an absence, I hope, of early-morning clouds to rain on my Canon camera and fisheye lens. So I’ll be pursuing some personal projects while I’m down there as well, and if they work out, I’ll post about it here.

But first I have to fly down there, which takes all night and half a day, hence all the packing and preparation. So there simply won’t be any more blogging today, and probably nothing from me tomorrow until late in the day. But there will be one very special guest post tomorrow, so do check in anyway.

1. Although pretty heavy in terms of traffic, thanks to Pharyngula and StumbleUpon. [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 4:51 pm and is filed under meta. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.