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The fire danger in the forest has gone to extreme - the highest level. I haven't looked at the fuel index, I am assuming it's not good. As far as I know, we're not under 5 minute evacuation orders.
The joy of living in a national forest!
For people new to my blog, my wife is an astronomer, and observatories, for the most part, are located at high altitude in remote places to minimize light and air pollution mucking up observations. Kinda makes sense, neh?
We're in the Lincoln National Forest, the home of Smokey Bear (Smokey The Bear is incorrect usage). The observatory has a sweetheart lease, something on the order of $100 a year from the government since it's a non-profit science operation. Now the forest service is demanding that if a fire breaks out anywhere near the observatory, or possibly ANYWHERE IN the Lincoln National Forest, that the observatory takes responsibility for it! The attorneys for the consortium that owns and operates the observatory are looking into the lease terms and seeing about this. It's pretty ridiculous, as they are very conscientious about how they operate: when the fire danger is high they take extreme precautions, smokers are required to smoke in their private vehicles, etc.
So basically they may shut down ALL observatory operations until monsoon season starts! With the exception of basic maintenance, such as filling instruments with liquid nitrogen, site inspections, etc.
Member institutions pay millions of dollars for access (sky time is roughly $1,000 an hour), and they're going to be losing a lot of time on sky because of this. They're not going to be happy, and there's going to be no way to pay them back. When time on sky is lost due to an instrument being broken, or the telescope breaks (motor controller, or who knows what), sometimes a member gets time paid back from engineering or other time holdbacks. But this could be a several week shutdown! Since all members will be affected more or less equally, paybacks just won't be possible and lots of science programs will be hit.
What's worse is it's likely some pre-empts like gamma ray bursts or possibly a new nova or supernova may be missed! This is when something new, unexepected and exciting happens and a proverbial shout goes out across the observatory community saying "Point your telescopes over THERE and gather as much data as you can because we don't know what the hell just happened!" Granted, novas are multi-year events, but GRBs can be very brief and need to have as much information gathered as fast as possible. Or targets like Venus: they can only be studied at certain times of the year! There's lots of objects like that.
Major suckage.
The joy of living in a national forest!
For people new to my blog, my wife is an astronomer, and observatories, for the most part, are located at high altitude in remote places to minimize light and air pollution mucking up observations. Kinda makes sense, neh?
We're in the Lincoln National Forest, the home of Smokey Bear (Smokey The Bear is incorrect usage). The observatory has a sweetheart lease, something on the order of $100 a year from the government since it's a non-profit science operation. Now the forest service is demanding that if a fire breaks out anywhere near the observatory, or possibly ANYWHERE IN the Lincoln National Forest, that the observatory takes responsibility for it! The attorneys for the consortium that owns and operates the observatory are looking into the lease terms and seeing about this. It's pretty ridiculous, as they are very conscientious about how they operate: when the fire danger is high they take extreme precautions, smokers are required to smoke in their private vehicles, etc.
So basically they may shut down ALL observatory operations until monsoon season starts! With the exception of basic maintenance, such as filling instruments with liquid nitrogen, site inspections, etc.
Member institutions pay millions of dollars for access (sky time is roughly $1,000 an hour), and they're going to be losing a lot of time on sky because of this. They're not going to be happy, and there's going to be no way to pay them back. When time on sky is lost due to an instrument being broken, or the telescope breaks (motor controller, or who knows what), sometimes a member gets time paid back from engineering or other time holdbacks. But this could be a several week shutdown! Since all members will be affected more or less equally, paybacks just won't be possible and lots of science programs will be hit.
What's worse is it's likely some pre-empts like gamma ray bursts or possibly a new nova or supernova may be missed! This is when something new, unexepected and exciting happens and a proverbial shout goes out across the observatory community saying "Point your telescopes over THERE and gather as much data as you can because we don't know what the hell just happened!" Granted, novas are multi-year events, but GRBs can be very brief and need to have as much information gathered as fast as possible. Or targets like Venus: they can only be studied at certain times of the year! There's lots of objects like that.
Major suckage.
