My wife's telescope might have to close temporarily

[thewayne]

The problem is distribution of employees. We live in Cloudcroft, 20 minutes or so away from the observatory. El Paso has one worker, and not only is their COVID case count exploding, they're instituting a curfew at night and putting beds in their convention center. So that employee might not be able to come across the state line. He initially wasn't able to work on-site when the telescope initially reopened and did a lot of remote work and work on other stuff.

Las Cruces has 2.5 employees, and is also experiencing a high case count.

Which means Russet, by herself, is the only one who can run the telescope. I.E. not possible. In the summer, she could run it on a varied schedule. In the winter, forget it. The shift - regardless of time of year - is an hour or so before sundown to an hour or so after sunrise. So winter is hell. And just not possible for one person over an extended period of time.

The other telescope, the Sloan 2.5 meter, has six people or so in the Cloudcroft/Alamogordo area, and they need two people per night, so they can probably remain operational. The site itself, most of those people are local.

Interesting times we live in.

EDIT: El Paso, by itself, is having more new COVID cases on a daily basis than New Mexico in toto. And Las Cruces is about 40 miles away, they're both on I-10 and have LOTS of back and forthing, people living in each other's city and working or going to uni in the other. That's one of the main cross-fertilizing factors. All of the counties in NM that are blowing up big - except ours, Otero, border Texas. I'm not sure why ours is not included in that group.

Comments

[warriorsavant]

Forgive what might be an ignorant question, but could it be reasonable to staff the telescope for half the night only? Or are observations only valid if you can track them then entire night.

[thewayne]

That's a good question.  The answer is it depends on the science programs.  Some programs can get good data with a half night's observation, some require a full night.  This is a guess, mind you, but it depends on the magnitude of the object.  The fainter the object, the longer the observation required to gather enough photons. The way the observatory works is it's owned by a partnership of universities/organizations that pay buckets of money for time.  Each org has a scheduler for various scientists to submit programs and the scheduler prioritizes them.  They get a bucket of time, roughly according to how much they pay, and that's usually allocated in half-nights.  They ask for nights according to dark, gray, or bright, according to moon phase.  My wife has to schedule all of those competing programs on a quarterly basis, keeping in mind when the objects are available.  It's a tough job because some objects are only available at certain times of the year, and if they're near the equator, literally only a few weeks of the year. Everybody wants dark.  Must have DARK.  Well, you can't always get what you want.

On top of it all, the telescope may be weathered-out, and time is lost.  Or a preferred instrument breaks, and backups that may not be quite as good have to be used.  On rare occasion, very VERY rare, the telescope itself freaks out and needs a night off.  Sometimes the programs get compensated and given more time later, sometimes it's just lost and it's recognized that's the way it happens.  Like all the time of the COVID shutdown: all that time was lost, and we can't reclaim lost time, nor can we shoehorn an additional three months of time into the future.  They still had to pay as the telescopes and salaries still ate money.

It's all quite a juggling act. Sometimes her nights are quite peaceful, sometimes they're complete mayhem.

[warriorsavant]

Thank you. I understand about “sorry you’re reserved time couldn’t happen, too bad,” but many ppl wouldn’t. In the end, if one did compensate lost time, then all the rates would have to go up to pay for that. TANSTAAFL.

[thewayne]

Yep, the only time they can compensate is when there's a GRB pre-empt.  When gamma-ray bursts and nova events happen, basically EVERY telescope in the appropriate hemisphere turn and point that way and start recording as much info as possible for as long as possible!  The pre-empted programs get compensated as there is a little bit of slack in the schedule, but that's usually the only time that programs get paid back. The worst is when programs simply do not appear for their scheduled time!  They leave phone numbers in their applications, yet even then my wife has to try to contact the institution schedulers to try to get ahold of these scientists because they're burning time!  The observatory might know vaguely what they want to observe and what instrument, but they don't have the specifics of how they want it done.  And on rare occasion, someone notices that Program A at Institution 1 is observing the same object as Program B at Institute 3 and you can get them talking together.  This frequently happens when all of a sudden there's six programs wanting to observe Venus, which is only visible at certain times of the year for a limited period of time.

[warriorsavant]

If I'm understanding correctly, she schedules the time, but she is also the one (or one of the ones) physically at the observatory while the people who have the time scheduled are remote, getting the data from her?

Does she also do her own experiments?

[thewayne]

She schedules the remote user's programs and the operators who actually run the telescope, open the dome, mount the instruments, fill the instruments with liquid nitrogen (those instruments that require it: others are cooled with electronic coolers), and monitor the weather.  And she's one of those operators.  Her crew operate two telescopes, the 3.5 meter and a dinky little .5 that's sort of 'given away' as a sweetener.  Same sort of operation: people submit proposals and are allocated time.  It's usually used by students. One of her workers has an actual program studying Venus, but she's gotten grants from the National Science Foundation and has submitted proposals through the system, so Russet schedules her to work when Venus is up so she can do her program at the same time.  It's pretty rare that they have slack time in the schedule that they can observe stuff and do science on their own.  On those rare occasions, they'll mount a camera or a spectrograph or even the eye piece and poke around the sky and have some fun. Even so, my wife has done observing for scientists that, for one reason or another, haven't been able to do their observations - all of them have, and when they do this they get a co-authorship on the eventual papers that come out of the research.