Meanwhile, in Japan...

A wild Pokemon appears!

Drawings of Scientists

Drawings of Scientists made by children before and after a visit to Fermilab.

Spiders

Your daily 'What the frak?'. How many guys in Spider-Man suits can fit inside Jamba Juice

The guy in front of me is smoking a pipe. i am very jealous.
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Shuttle launch as seen by a skydiver

Epic.

Back at VERITAS

I flew to VERITAS yesterday. A fairly uneventful flight, except for the super creepy 900 year-old woman sitting next to me, I will admit that I was pretty fed up of being seated down by the end. 

I leave Saturday morning, David (my supervisor and I) are going to be setting up a reflectometer; we're trying to measure the reflectivity of the mirrors on each of the telescopes. I'll try to grab some pictures while we're working on it.

Last night I was invited to go check out a 60" optical telescope that is also on the Ridge here. It's a one-man job (compared to the three observers required for VERITAS). They only do spectroscopy there, so unfortunately I haven't any pretty images from a giant telescope to show. 

I was using my camera, however. The sky was incredibly clear, and the galactic plane is starting to come up (i.e. we can see the Milky Way). I grabbed one good picture of it on a 60-second exposure; the issue is that any longer and we start to see star trails due to the Earth's rotation. Too bad, because at about 120 seconds, the colors of the Milky Way start to really come out.

I am a scientist.

This is how we see the world.

Mezzanine Complete

Yesterday, Adam (an engineer in the lab downstairs) and I managed to complete my MkI mezzanine board, and it seems to be working splendidly. I've only got one channel (of seven) running because the chips we're using are really tiny, and we accidentally destroyed one while setting up the first channel. Given that they are seven bucks a pop, we decided to hold off and just have a circuit board printed, rather than breadboard it. I'm at home now, but I'll snap an image of it tomorrow.

Apart from that, I'm off to VERITAS Tuesday of next week, to test out a reflectometer and maybe do take some alignment data for the telescopes. It'll be my first time working there at night, I'll learn how to operate the telescopes, at least a bit.

Mezzanines

Back from CASCA since Friday. I've been working on getting a few things built, namely my mezzanine board which I'm going to mount on the FPGA board. The mezzanine is really simple; I have an input that takes the signal from each camera pixel and converts it into a signal that the FPGA can read via a really fast comparator.

For those of you who don't know, a comparator is (typically) an op-amp that compares two voltages at its input and then produces a high or low output depending on which of the two is greater. 

Once the mezzanine is on order, I have to buckle down and finish debugging a few pits and pieces of code that aren't working exactly like they are supposed to. Namely, some of my data isn't making its way into the packets that are being streamed to the computer.

The poster that I made for CASCA is available here.