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.