Credit where it is due

/rant_start

I am actually at a loss. When you open a news paper or turn on the radio, you hear of celebrity gossip, famous entertainers, football players etc etc - and you can find incredible amounts of information out about them.

I want you to take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alf_Adams

This man improved lasers so much that CD's could be available to the mass market and lasers could be used for scanning barcodes. Which of course led to countless other things (Bluray, DVD's). It is a crying shame that this man has only 2 lines of text about him on Wikipedia, when he's done so much for the world.

I continue to be frustrated at the site of 100 different magazines on how to put lipstick on or, what people are doing on "The only way is Essex": but yet there is seldom a single magazine on science; one of the only things that is actually changing the world...

The thing is, scientists like Alf do not mind - they love what they do. We must also celebrate doctors, nurses, charity workers, emergency services too... I would simply like to see a world where the real movers and shakers are reported.


Anyway, that is my 2 pence about that - this is more on how I feel, although unrelated!! :P...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE


/rant_end

Watch this space...

Hi all!


Just a quick update really, I've been a bit slack and not done the third update to my last post... mainly because the data are not as interesting in their raw form. Hopefully some time in December I will add some nifty never-before-seen maps of Saturn, by maps I mean, it will show temperatures and densities of the Aurora. Before I do, I need them to be scrutinized and sent off to be published at least!

J

Mauna Kea - The summit [part 2]

It's now the "morning after" the observing night - I quote this because it's mid-late afternoon as I write this.

The night was not successful from a data gathering point of view, we were frustrated by high cirrus clouds all of the night. We continued to observe whenever there were breaks in the clouds, recording what we could - there is probably some useful information in the data we can use, e.g. to find some temperatures of Jupiter, although these may not be completely accurate results! It is fairly rare for non-clear nights at Mauna Kea, they say it is clear ~90% of the time, so we just have to accept the unfortunate luck.

All-sky camera image from last night, records a 360 degrees view of the sky at the summit. This particular one records in infrared, hence being able to see at night. This indicates how little we could see :-(

The summit of Mauna Kea (MK)

I suppose I should start by saying some of the usual facts about MK, best as a list:

• Height: 4,205m (13,796ft - yes, I got this wrong in my last post..)
• 40% less air available than at sea level...
• ...so much less 'stuff' gets in the way of observing the universe
• Often extremely dry and temperatures float around  0 deg Celsius most of the year
• Measured from the sea floor it is 10,000m tall - 1152m taller than Mount Everest
• It is actually a volcano, last erupting ~4,600years ago and is expected to erupt in the future
• Home to 13 working telescopes, mostly for optical & infrared astronomy
• It includes the largest optical/infrared telescopes in the world (the Keck telescopes), the largest dedicated infrared telescope (UKIRT) and the largest submillimeter telescope in the world (JCMT)
• It is the proposed home to the new Thirty Metre Telescope (10x higher spatial resolution than Hubble)

And many more...

The Drive up...

So last night we headed up to the summit in one of the many 4x4's that NASA own for the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), in which I have the pleasure of driving up every night we observe, at just after 10pm at night (Hawai'i time).

 The road itself is about 8 miles long, with the first 5 basically just gravel - very bumpy gravel. Due to the fact the mountain is so shallow compared to most mountains - because the lava was very runny when it came out ages ago, it is possible to drive up the whole way, this means you really do notice the pressure dropping and your ears popping! The route is full of blind turns, narrow roads and steep drops - with the occasional rocks in the road to watch out for, I must say in driving up you have to get used to literally sliding all over the place in some parts...Nonetheless a really exciting drive!

What NOT to do. This was many years ago on the route BEFORE the base camp.

When you get past the 5miles of off-road type roads, you reach a normal road again, and after few miles on this you must then turn off your lights and switch to hazard lights - so your lights don't spoil peoples observations. So you must navigate your way up using the orange flashes of your hazards - bare in mind it is pitch black -absolutely no lights anywhere, unless the Moon is out, in which case safety is definitely increased!

So, here are some pictures from the top taken on my last trip when we went up when it was light once, since when I get up this time it is always dark. By the time we finish observing each night though it is fairly light and we are often treated to spectacular sunrises, the best views I've seen in my life without a doubt!

Sunrise this morning, still cloudy! From left to right, Canada-France telescope; Gemini Observatory; UH 2.2 ; UK Infrared Telescope UKIRT. Sorry about the bad lighting!

Sunset earlier in the year in between the Keck telescopes, on the left is the Subaru 'scope.

Earlier in the year having a cheesy shot of me outside the NASA IRTF

Will talk about the observing itself eventually! Cheers for stopping by.

J

Greetings from Mauna Kea [part 1]

Hello all! I came up with all of the fancy idea that I would post weekly or monthly regarding the PhD and research, however I quickly realised that it isn't always interesting to talk about programming and perhaps I got a little busy. Excuses complete.


What I've been up to since my last entry...
In the March/April time this year I was lucky enough to have the chance to observe at the Mauna Kea observatory, located on the Big Island of Hawaii. On that trip we (Dr. Henrik Melin and I) observed Saturn using the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), great times! Note: I really should have blogged the last trip! Following this, when I came back I started working on Saturn spectral (light spectrum) data rather than the Jupiter data we have, this data was from the Keck telescope though - taken by my supervisor Dr. Tom Stallard.


Now:
Since I'm now technically a 'trained astronomer' since the last trip (something I do not yet believe!), I now have access to a fancy observers grant. So now I have been lucky again and am on a second observing trip, this time we (Tom, myself and a Dr. Alberto Adriani (who works on Juno!)) are observing Jupiter for 5 nights in a row at the NASA IRTF.

Mauna Kea - observing diary

So, as some of you know Hawaii is rather far away for anyone (at least 5hours to any mainland (i.e. the US west coast (god I should stop using so many brackets!))), but more so for people in the UK... Here is a short clip that my supervisor took of the journey, which really saves me a lot of time explaining that part! Needless to say it is a tiring trip! 

Continuing from the video, I now speak to you from the observatories base camp that is Hale Pohaku, where we are acclimatising for the night to get used to 9000ft. We acclimatise to get used to having 75-80% of normal sea-level atmospheric pressure (i.e. we have 25% less stuff to breathe), this is so that when we go up to observe at 14,500ft (60-65% atmosphere...) we stand a fighting chance of not being out of breath and confused.

Hale Pohaku view (taken myself) 26/09/2011 - heavenly no?

Some things that happen with this reduced air:

• Out of breath much quicker thanks to less oxygen, obviously need to breath a bit more!
• Sleeping can be difficult...
• ...so you wake up periodically and seem to notice all the dreams you have, having been awoken during REM in your sleep cycle (I presume!)
• Headaches can occur (although I've not suffered this before)
• Confusion/clumsiness can occur and this is a problem for anyone, especially as we are using millions of dollars worth of equipment and even more especially that we must drive up to the summit -I'll be doing all the driving on this trip. More on the drive in [Part 2]...

*edit* My battle now is to stay awake until 6am, I had a nap from 6-9pm to give me the strength to do so, but since the observations are between 11pm-6am it is ideal that we be wide awake at those times. Having just gotten used to be -11 hours from UK time, I now must get used to +11hours observing time, which puts me working around 10am-5pm UK time, funnily enough.

I think for now this will be all on the matter, I've recapped the last few months and told you where I am right now. My next entry will be about the trip to the summit with pretty pictures with a brief intro into the observing itself, the third and higher entries will be all about the observations themselves!

Stay tuned! Feel free to ask any questions as well, even if I haven't posted on the blogs for months I still receive notifications that I will respond to!

Cheers!
James

Day-to-day research activities (PhD life II)

Hi folks!

I received an anonymous email from somebody that happened upon this blog, this email asked if I'd talk a little more about the "average day" or "day-to-day" routines that go on if you are researching. I think this is important because a standard PhD here in the UK is 3.5 years, or greater in many countries (USA=4year?), so obviously it is good to do some pre-research research.

 I wanted to do this eventually, but thought it was maybe a little arrogant of me to do it so soon into PhD. Further thinking, though, shows that this is probably one of the best times to talk about it! It would be a great idea to show how the work changes over the course of the next few years.

In my previous PhD life blog (PhD life I), I have briefly described some of the main 'events' that occur, for example - seminars; 0~2 times a month. Anyway without further ado, I give you a few typical couple of days from this weeks shenanigans...




Sorry not sure how that got in there...


Monday

• This morning I got up at 9am and decided to work from home, yes - we can do that! 
• My main task this week is to process data, by which I mean cleaning images; by which I mean clicking on pin-points of light on my monitor that do not belong on the images, which removes them. I have about 300 more images to process by this point, estimated time to complete is Thursday!
• I continued this till around 12:30 and then had some lunch, being at home gave me the benefit of having lunch far quicker than if I were in the office - which makes up for starting late, I hope.
• A bit of a twist to this day came in the afternoon when I was drafted to help out with some lab demonstrating for 'astrophysical techniques'. In other words I was asked to help undergraduates with their lab work, which is to design, build and use a telescope. I had prepared for this at the weekend by reading the manual they would be working with; on Sunday I spent about 3hours making sure I knew most of it. This ran from 2-5pm and went without much trouble, since this was the first time I'd demonstrated, the teacher of this session was on hand to help!
• So after this day was over on the campus I headed home, mentally drained but happy to have re-learnt many things about telescopes - plus the university pay by the hour for demonstrating! Funnily enough, when home I ended up processing several more images...glutton for punishment that day I guess?

Friday

• OK - I got up at a more respectable 8am this day, I really wanted to finish everything off so I got to my office before 9am. After finishing cleaning all of the images on Thursday, I proceeded to process some of the 'scraps', during the week I found that there were a few dozen more files to do. I also had to establish reasons for why some of the files were unable to be processed; in all there were only about 3 baddies out of the full 600, which is amazing! 
• Break time! In our office we tend to have a break at around 10:20am every day (not mentioned in Monday's post because I was at home that morning). We tend to do the daily crossword from the Guardian news paper, and I tend to barely understand any of the clues and feel stupid. It is also a time to catch up with people and what they are doing, this is usually work related (conferences, papers...etc) but is often the type of general chit-chat you get in every workplace!
• Fast forwarding to the afternoon, because I would just be repeating myself from Monday's routine. I had just finished going through all of the data in time for a quick afternoon break at around 3:30pm. After this I simply collated all of my results on to one A4 page - a kind of summary, since prior to this everything was scribbled on bits of paper all over my desk!
  

So I hope you have seen that these are simply two random days when no special event is going on, other days will differ - next week I will be doing some more lab demonstrating and instead of data processing I will be creating programs for the next stage of work (which I have little clue about right now!). 

If you are considering a career in research in the next few years, I hope you will follow this blog and it will give you some indication of what it can be like. The days I have described were essentially like an office job, but knowledge does come out at the end of all this processing, and science can be extracted!


My next blog will most likely be a tribute to all the most pioneering satellites of the outer solar system, they have a great story to tell!

Thanks,

James

Jupiter facts - From the core to the cloud tops!

Hello there!

I thought I'd make this one a little fun and talk about some of the facts about Jupiter, some quick facts and a lot of information on the interior. Obviously this is something you can just Wiki, but to make it better I'll be using a rather amazing book, my own knowledge and some key sites. There is a lot here which is hard to find on the web, hopefully most of this is interesting, I'm only sorry I didn't include more...

First I think some quick facts are in order just to give you an overview!

Jupiter - quick facts

Jupiter
Credit: NASA

The main properties:

• Jupiter Mass - 1898,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kilograms                            Or... 317.83 Earth masses. Or... 1.8986 x10^27 Kg
  
• Jupiter Volume - 1431,280,000,000,000 cubic kilometres
    Or... 1321.3 Earth volumes. Or... 1.43128 x10^15 km^3
  
• Jupiter Density - 1326 Kilograms per metre cubed
    Or... 24% as dense as the Earth. Or...  1.326 x10^3 Kg/m^3
  
• Jupiter Radius (equatorial) - 71,492 Kilometres
    Or... 11.2 Earth Radii. Or... 7.149 x10^4 Km

Other important facts:

• A day on Jupiter is 9 Hours, 55minutes, 33seconds
• A year on Jupiter is 11 years, 317 days, 13 hours
• Jupiter's distance from the sun is 777,909,600 kilometres (5.2A.U.)
• Jupiter has 63 Moons: The largest 4 are Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto 
• Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest in the solar system, it is approx 6.4million Km in radius (90 Jupiter radii). If it were visible, it would appear several times larger than our Moon does in the night sky.
• Jupiter's composition: 89.8% Hydrogen, 10% Helium approx.

OK so that was about as concise as I could make it. There were a lot of times when I wanted to explode with additional information; having not mentioned the history of observations and various probes that have been sent... I'll endeavour to make more posts regarding those in the future. Now for the science bit:

Jupiter's Interior

I'm going to go ahead and give a brief tour of Jupiter's guts, this shows everything:

• JUPITER'S CORE
  Going against the picture for one instance, Jupiter does in fact have a core; it isn't going to be empty space now is it? The core of Jupiter is approximately 20,000 degrees C and is cooling down at a rate of 1degrees C per 1 million years. It is also contracting under gravity at a rate of ~3cm per year. Due to the relatively warm conditions within, Jupiter's core is more likely to be liquid than solid. The pressure in this region is 40million Earth atmospheres (40million bar).
  The immense heat described above comes from the fact that Jupiter was formed from an enormous gas cloud, the gravitational energy that brought it together was and continues to be converted into heat energy. In other words, gravity gives particles kinetic energy (movement), and this is transformed into heat when particles collide - analogous to friction!
  
  
• Metallic Hydrogen Layer and magnetic field production
  Moving out to the 60,000-40,000km deep region shown on the above image the temperature reduces to 8,400 degrees C. The pressure (4million bar this time) is so enormous that the hydrogen atoms are split up into their constituent parts - Protons and Electrons.
  
  If you think back to your science classes in electricity, you will see that if you have charged particles (Electrons) moving, a current is produced. Now if you recall lessons in magnetism, you will remember that a moving current gives rise to a magnetic field. It is this vast amount of moving charge that gives rise to the largest magnetosphere (planetary magnetic field) in the solar system; Jupiter's. This layer is known as a Helium-Rich region, it contains more than the next layer...
  
  
• Molecular Region and Helium rain through the transition regionAn interesting phenomenon occurs in the transition region, recent studies show that Helium falls down into the lower Metallic region, this is known as Helium rain. It isn't exactly like normal rain, it is more like pouring a heavier liquid over a light one and seeing it seep through. 
  In the molecular region where molecules aren't destroyed by the pressure on them at this point - 20,000km ish, the pressure is 0.5 million bar and the temperature is a much cooler 5000degrees C. This region is known as a Helium-Poor region for it is losing it to lower layers by 'rain' described above.
  
  
• Jupiter's surface and atmosphere???
  I think this is a question that baffles a lot of people, I will settle this once and for all... I hope. Firstly it is best to picture Jupiter as a giant ball of liquid (because that's what it is), so in that respect it must eventually have a kind of surface, just not the type you'd want to land on! Secondly, the question is where do you draw a line, the answer is simple...instead of using Jupiter's surface, we just use our own - Jupiter's surface is defined as 'the 1 bar level' or '1 Earth atmosphere'.
  
  So the atmosphere is then everything above 1 bar just like it is for the Earth! I will briefly summarise the atmosphere because we know an awful lot more about it than anything else - it deserves several blog posts of it's own. Jupiter's atmosphere extends from the 1 bar level to about 1000km, it has a temperature ranging from approximately -200 up to 800 deg C. The interesting thing to note at this point is, this is the part we observe from the Earth, and it is found that Jupiter is giving off twice as much heat as it is receiving, nobody knows how this is happening; although it must obviously be emanating from the hot core.
  
  
  Well thank you for your interest in Jupiter to those that have read this, I partially posted this so I could reinforce my own perspective of the planet - it is important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
  
  See you soon!
  
  
  
  
  - Further reading if you want it:
  For general reading: this book is handy for gas giant related things.
  I used this book to check some nice facts, I recommend it for researchers, it is pretty much the only comprehensive book on the subject, and they do a grand job!

Looking at Jupiter's hot body (emissions)

Hello there, this weekend I am struggling against a migraine, so this post will have to be short; and whilst I have a window of opportunity given to me by analgesics!

So I am now 3 months and 13 days into my new career which started on the conveniently-to-remember date; 10-10-10. 

In my present work, I have been 'cleaning' spectral images of Jupiter taken in Aug 2010 from the NASA infra-red telescope facility in Hawai'i. Note that I stated 'spectral images' and not simply 'images', the difference in this case is that a spectral image is one which shows the different amounts of light intensity at different wavelengths, e.g. Red light has an intensity of 50, blue light has an intensity of 100. With this information you can find the temperature of the body that has emitted it. So my work is to find the temperature of Jupiter's upper atmosphere by analysing the spectral data of it. I will talk more about spectral images in the future, when they are cleaned and ready. For now, below shows the difference:

Jupiter; a 'normal' image. Using it's Infra-red emissions.
Note the line in the middle is the 'spectrograph'

Jupiter; a spectral image. Using Infra-red emissions.
This is from the 'spectrograph' shown in the 'normal' image, each line from left to right in this image represents a different intensity of emission from Jupiter at different wavelengths, but all on the same one line seen on the 'normal' image. I'll go over this again in detail some day...!

So what do I mean by cleaning? Intuitively, cleaning these images means getting rid of dirt, in this case the dirt is in the form of sky emissions, cosmic rays and 'background noise'. I will talk about these below:

• Sky emission? The telescope pointed at Jupiter to record it in the infra-red (IR) region, unfortunately, the telescope is peering through the Earth's atmospheric medium, which has it's own IR emissions - so the telescope takes a picture of Jupiter, denoted A and then a picture of our own sky, denoted B and by subtracting B from A in a process called 'A B subtraction' the unwanted emissions are cleaned away.
• Cosmic Rays? These are essentially high energy particles from space, such as protons and electrons, when one of these bad boys enters the CCD lens of the camera behind the telescope, a bright flash is recorded - which looks not disimilar to a star.
• Other background noise includes IR emission by the equipment on the telescope, this is mostly removed by super-cooling  the equipment with liquid nitrogen, so that it does not radiate. The CCD lens on the camera is never 100% accurate either, some parts of the lens will record better than others, to get around this a process of flat-fielding is performed. Flat-fielding involves perfectly illuminating the CCD lens and taking an image, then it can be seen which bits aren't picking up the light as well as others. This becomes rather a complicated procedure so I won't go into it now, but it is worth mentioning that this is one of the most difficult noises to get rid of, e.g. if a pixel isn't picking up anything at all, information is permanently lost and you can never know what was there!

So maybe this wasn't as short as I thought it'd be! Thanks for reading, sorry if it is confusing - feel free to ask questions or correct me if I'm wrong ;-)

James