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