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Parallel Postage!
Aug. 9th, 2004 12:28 amA first, I’m doing a dual post between my blogs on Xanga and LJ.
I got some cool news last night from my girlfriend. For those on LJ who know not of her, she’s an astronomer in New Mexico. Every July they close for the entire month to do extended maintenance, up to and including re-aluminizing the mirrors. They don’t re-aluminize every mirror every year, this year they’re doing at least two.
Russet (the girlfriend) runs a 3.5 meter telescope. That mirror gets redone every 5-7 years and this is not one of its years. To redo it, they book at Kitt Peak (Tucson, AZ, about 380 miles or so from her observatory at Apache Point) about 8 months in advance, then they make all sorts of arrangements to have roads closed, Slow Truck chase vehicles, utility lines moved, etc. But that wasn’t in the plans for this year. Still, they normally remove the mirror from the telescope housing to clean it, but this year they were going to try something different and had worked out a methodology to clean it in situ.
That was the plan until a few weeks ago when someone broke the mirror covers. I’m not going to recap the incident, it’s covered in my Xanga blog.
ANYWAY, so they had to remove the mirror in order to repair/rebuild the mirror covers. That’s done now, and Thursday they’re going to clean the mirror (a process that takes a few hours), then next Monday or Tuesday or so they’re reinstalling it.
And I have permission to be there!
The major coolness of this is that Russet bought me what is perhaps the best advanced consumer digital camera currently available, the Canon Eos Digital Rebel. It has some amazing features, and the coolest is that when it is connected to a computer via USB, you can run a control program and the computer will function as an intervelometer, firing the camera every X seconds/minutes, transferring the photos straight to the computer’s hard drive.
So my plan is to have it fire every 30 seconds or once a minute if I have enough disk space. Once the event is done, I’m going to take the photos and run them through a slide show program which basically turns them into a stop-motion movie. It’s really cool, and you’ll see this million dollar/multi-ton mirror being installed in a matter of a few minutes.
So I’m really looking forward to this. But there’s one hitch....
My dad is having an angioplasty done Monday AM with the probability of stents being put in.
Not a major process, but knowing that my dad is 70 and my mom is a couple years older gives you a cold slap upside the head to remind you that your parents won’t be around forever and possibly not for much longer. Anything can go wrong in medical procedures, there are tons of tales of people who go in for just such a procedure and they do an emergency bypass operation because the conditions are so bad and the cardiologist has no idea how the person is still alive.
Sobering and a little scary. It’s been many years since I’ve been to a funeral after what seemed like a decade of going to two or three a year. I pray there isn’t one in my near future.
I got some cool news last night from my girlfriend. For those on LJ who know not of her, she’s an astronomer in New Mexico. Every July they close for the entire month to do extended maintenance, up to and including re-aluminizing the mirrors. They don’t re-aluminize every mirror every year, this year they’re doing at least two.
Russet (the girlfriend) runs a 3.5 meter telescope. That mirror gets redone every 5-7 years and this is not one of its years. To redo it, they book at Kitt Peak (Tucson, AZ, about 380 miles or so from her observatory at Apache Point) about 8 months in advance, then they make all sorts of arrangements to have roads closed, Slow Truck chase vehicles, utility lines moved, etc. But that wasn’t in the plans for this year. Still, they normally remove the mirror from the telescope housing to clean it, but this year they were going to try something different and had worked out a methodology to clean it in situ.
That was the plan until a few weeks ago when someone broke the mirror covers. I’m not going to recap the incident, it’s covered in my Xanga blog.
ANYWAY, so they had to remove the mirror in order to repair/rebuild the mirror covers. That’s done now, and Thursday they’re going to clean the mirror (a process that takes a few hours), then next Monday or Tuesday or so they’re reinstalling it.
And I have permission to be there!
The major coolness of this is that Russet bought me what is perhaps the best advanced consumer digital camera currently available, the Canon Eos Digital Rebel. It has some amazing features, and the coolest is that when it is connected to a computer via USB, you can run a control program and the computer will function as an intervelometer, firing the camera every X seconds/minutes, transferring the photos straight to the computer’s hard drive.
So my plan is to have it fire every 30 seconds or once a minute if I have enough disk space. Once the event is done, I’m going to take the photos and run them through a slide show program which basically turns them into a stop-motion movie. It’s really cool, and you’ll see this million dollar/multi-ton mirror being installed in a matter of a few minutes.
So I’m really looking forward to this. But there’s one hitch....
My dad is having an angioplasty done Monday AM with the probability of stents being put in.
Not a major process, but knowing that my dad is 70 and my mom is a couple years older gives you a cold slap upside the head to remind you that your parents won’t be around forever and possibly not for much longer. Anything can go wrong in medical procedures, there are tons of tales of people who go in for just such a procedure and they do an emergency bypass operation because the conditions are so bad and the cardiologist has no idea how the person is still alive.
Sobering and a little scary. It’s been many years since I’ve been to a funeral after what seemed like a decade of going to two or three a year. I pray there isn’t one in my near future.
