Blog of a bald geek.

Had a pretty good fathers day.
By far the highlight was taking the Nate Harrison Grade road down from the summit of Palomar (where Freddy and I were giving tours of the 2oo inch Hale Telescope as we always do on the third Sunday of each month).
I have been wanting to take the road because its such an important part of the history of Palomar Mountain. A lot of the dome and 18 inch telescope parts were taken up that road.
The road is a little rough at the top, but the bulk of it is really good.
The views, wild flowers and twisty nature of the road is just a joy to be there.
I think Freddy enjoyed it just as much, if not more than I did.

Nate Harrison Grade

Click on it to make it bigger.

Came home to a nice bottle of red wine and Freddys cooking.

Had a fantastic opportunity Saturday night….. The 200 inch Hale telescope is having its mirror supports refurbished. This means that there are no astronomers using the telescope. In fact, for this one weekend, it also meant that there were no engineers working either…. so the place was pretty much empty…… Enter the docents!
Freddy and I were invited to sleep over at the Observatory along with a few others.
We arrived just after sundown and had the chance to look at some of the work going on in the 200 inch dome.

I took the above photo of the Rangie parked outside the dome. It was pretty cool to be the only ones there other than Jean, the telescope operator.

It goes with out saying that I was really excited to be there, here is a photo of Freddy being excited about being there with me…..

Ever the suffering geeks wife, she made the best of hanging around in a very quite dome…. Apparently she almost feel asleep!

George Hale changed the way astronomy was done by having sleeping quarters, houses and workshops on site with the telescope.
Back in the day, astronomy (sadly) was limited to a mans domain, so the sleeping quarters were called the monastery. To this day, they are still called that.
Here is a photo at night of the monastery that we ate and slept in.

I don’t have a photo of dinner, the food was just too good to break away from!

Next morning, I was up before dawn to take some photos. You just don’t get a chance to be up there before sunrise, so I was not going to waste it with sleep!

That’s the 60 inch and 200 inch domes in the morning glow.

Once back with the rest of the sleepyheads, we had breakfast;

This is the same table that the greats of the Hale Telescope would have had breakfast and dinner at!

It was one of the best few hours sleep I have ever had! The place is so quite and despite my excitement, I was sound asleep a few minutes when we retired at might night.

It was a great chance to get to know some of the other Docents better and off the job so to speak. We shared stories and photos, it was a lot of fun and really interesting.

All in all, just an amazing experience. I wonder if I we will ever get the chance to do it again?
I would like to thank Scott and Susan for making it all happen.

Its a little late….. Hey, I have said it before and I am going to keep saying it, I have never worked so hard in my entire life…. Its both good and bad, the days fly by, but I miss my days off…the bottom line is that things take longer to do! Anyway, if you have been reading my micro blog, you would have known that I headed up to Palomar Mountain for two reasons;
1. To go for a night ride. I love riding at night and I have not really been out since I put the new globes in the bike……The HID head lights are the go…. they are just fantastic!  I need to do the web page on them, I really do, but I am a tad busy, I mentioned that right? Anyway, went up the short twisty way, came home the long back way. Nice. Got home about 1:45am. Hey, that’s about Gary time, we should go for that same night ride when he comes over….hmmmm…. wonder if he would feel any better about being on the back of the bike if its pitch black except for the cone of ‘daylight’ coming out the front of the Goldwing???

I went up to look at the LGS. No, not LSD, LGS…. it stands for Laser Guide Star.
<Warning, light geek content following>
What happens is that when you take a photo of stuff in the night sky, generally you guide the telescope on a star next to said object. Some times however, there is no nearby star. What to do? Make your own is the answer.
Get a pretty powerful laser, at just the right color, shoot it into the sky and look at the ‘dot’ at the ‘end’ with said telescope. Hey presto, one star that you can guide the telescope with.

But wait, there is more.
Some bright spark figured out that the laser star ‘twinkles’ just the real stars because the fake star has to reflect its light back through the same unstable atmosphere as the real stars.
Here is where it gets really cool. What if you took that twinkling laser star and used a really thin mirror and connected it to a computer and bunch of actuators and warped the mirror really quick and effectively de-twinkled the star? It would be like you put the telescope into orbit and could take super clear photos of objects .
So, every now and then, thats what they do at Palomar Observatory.
I wanted to see it, so I rode up and checked it out.
Its pretty cool. (Hey, its a geek thing, so just nod your head, smile and pretend to be interested, it will be over soon).

Besides, it was a nice mild night for a ride and I couldn’t sleep anyway…….

Here is the start of the photos I took.

This coming Sunday Freddy and I will be giving our first ever public tour of the Hale Telescope, cant speak for Freddy, but I am nervous and excited.
As you regular blog followers would know, last month we did some training. One of the training sessions was that we got to go pretty much all over the place (prime focus about the only spot left on my list).
That way we can answer most questions along the lines of ‘Whats behind that door?’ It also means we know our way around the observatory and can thus move the group efficiently.
Here are some photos of me in said very cool places……..

I am the guy on the far right….. Even looking at this photo now, its hard to believe that I was right there!

This one is taken inside the east arm…..note the smile…. I was pretty happy to get to go to these places that I had only read about.
Can you really get this???… I am INSIDE the Hale Telescope…. ok, ok, well, I know that one or two of you will get it. It was VERY cool.

Here is one of me in the cassegrain cage, it is where all the good stuff is….. Once again, you can tell I am pretty happy to be there!

Lastly, here is a photo of Freddy and I mucking about with the new display that is at the outreach center;

You can click on any of the photos to get larger versions if you are so inclined.

Anyway, Im sure in due course you will hear how the first tour goes…….

Saturday night there was a club star party at one of the members house.
Freddy and I drove about 40 minutes out of town to go.
There was real nice company, nice telescopes, nice dark skies and the woman set up inside in the warm, so it was good all round.
A few of the guys gave me a bit of a tour and I am slowly getting my head around these northern skies.
There was a ‘vacant’ 12inch dob that another guy and I took turns with, it was a lot of fun.

I took this photo of the host at his laptop setting up an imaging session.

(Notice that Orion is the right way up, his sword is hanging down!)

Thanks Terry, it was a great night, hope your photos work out.

I said I would ‘never’ do any post processing on my photos….. well, I know better than to try and defend my actions against you lot, so here they are;

This one is just Ok, its interesting because you can see markings on the paint that you cant see in a normal photo.

This next one is the one that I like the best. It has a real, old industrial feel to it. A kind of old-meets-new, and its exactly how I feel a lot of times when I look at the telescope…. I mean it was built in the 1930′s and yet here we are doing state of the art astronomy on it. This processed photo reflects that (well, in my minds eye it does).

So, let the record show that these photos are NOT the desired post processing results I was looking for.
They are just some interesting effects that I found along the way.

IF I can get the results I am looking for, you will know via this blog, until then, I aint saying nothing about what I am never going to do!

Its not something that will be as big a deal for the regular readers of this blog as for me, but, well, I was surprised, and sprang to immediate action to right my wrong.

What am I talking about? All this time I have been calling it Mount Palomar, but I found out in yesterdays Docent training that I have been wrong. Its proper name is Palomar Mountain. (Pretty cool site there, click around a bit and see what you can see).
I got home from training and straight away changed the names on my web site pages.
Its tough to catch myself when thinking and talking about it, but I aim to get it right!