Blue Collar Scientist

The final video from the Junk Bond Observatory trip is up at YouTube.

If you sent in a question, and haven’t heard it answered yet, it will be covered here. Enjoy!

My previous two videos about Junk Bond Observatory have inspired some Q&A, so I’ve posted part one (of two) of some answers to the questions that have been posted to the blog as comments, and/or e-mailed to me. This is a bit dry, I know, but it is what I do for a living, and I don’t know how to make it interesting unless you are really obsessed with high performance telescopes that aren’t being controlled by grad-student-ware¹. Anyway, here it is:

If you want to keep up with my future videos, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

The next two videos coming up will be part two of the Q&A, and a video of a short presentation I gave at a religious school.

1. This is a slightly derogatory term referring to kludged-together software, generally written in some deplorably out of date language or development environment, with many bad architectural choices made, by the graduate students tasked with writing it in return for peanuts and water from the drinking fountain down the hall. In astronomy, grad-student-ware (cf. shareware, freeware) seems to be responsible for more observatory downtime and observational overhead than any other source. [↩]

I’ve finally completed the video about data reduction at Junk Bond Observatory. In this video, we answer the question of how Junk Bond Observatory got its name, and provide a demonstration of what our images look like and how we turn them into scientific results. The demonstration by Dave is followed by a higher-resolution screen recording to show you the details, so stick with it to the end if you are interested in seeing the images up close. (And yes, I know this isn’t the best way - I’ve been learning whole new continents of my computing system doing this, and I am learning, but if I wait to post until I’ve learned everything, I’ll never get around to posting this stuff.)

In the next video, I’ll have answers to the rest of the questions that people asked after the first video was posted, and hopefully it won’t take me so long to get it posted. What can I say - I’m on a working trip. Work comes first, and even though the formal purpose for the visit was fulfilled sometime yesterday, I’ve still been quite busy taking care of loose ends and addressing things that I felt needed to be dealt with before I left.

Tomorrow will be a semi-travel day for me; I’ll be leaving JBO around noon Arizona time and heading up to Tucson, with a long stop to visit some people in between. Then Wednesday is a travel day. Blogging will continue to be light, sporadic, and possibly sub-standard until I’m home and have had a chance to sleep properly. But I’m hoping to get a few things posted from the hotel in Tucson, so stay tuned.

Earlier today I took some time out of my work schedule to record a little tour of the 0.8 meter telescope at Junk Bond Observatory, which is where I’m working for the next six days. This is totally ad-lib, with no script or outline, and it was all done with the iSight camera on my MacBook, so I apologize of the quality is not up to standards.

This is probably going to be a bit more accessible to astronomy types, so if you have questions or want to hear more about something, please leave a comment and let me know.

 

 Junk Bond Observatory tour: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download