6 week update...

So, I've been incredibly busy recently. As a good recap, please find the following blurb I wrote about a week ago. Following the jump, is an update to date and some pictures. 

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Captain's Log, stardate 201008.21.

To my followers (both of you), I am sorry about my inability to update this blog recently. I've been preparing for my three month exodus to the deserts of Arizona (ie, my return to the VERITAS site). 

I've finished building my detector. Adam and I designed and built a mezzanine to connect to the FPGA so that I can actually test some real signals. I only got the detector working fast the day before I left, however, so I'm going to have to do some work on it once I arrive on site. 

I left home at 9AM yesterday and arrived in Columbus, Ohio some 14 hours later. I crossed the border at the Thousand Island Bridge (beautiful). The line I was in at Customs was very slow, I figured that the agent was being thorough, and so I got ready to whip out my travel itinerary, the letters from my supervisor and the VERITAS basecamp manager that prove my intentions. 40 minutes after arriving, I pulled into the booth, handed over my passport, informed him that I was, indeed, driving to Arizona, and he just waved me through, to my surprise. I was expecting him to pull me over and go through all my equipment (I have my detector and three computers including my desktop tower with me), a telescope and a guitar.  Hell, the car in front of me was from New York State and they had their trunk opened at least. 

I'm not complaining, by any means, just very surprised. Totally painless.

By about 7 I was in the vicinity of Cleveland, so I pulled over at the first place I saw for food (a Waffle House), had some mystery meat (they called it a steak but had the wrong texture), and left again. Right around Columbus, I saw this mad accident, a guy my age or yonger with the back end of his car bashed in. Some 200 feet later, the car that hit him was in considerably worse shape. Once the traffic cleared, I was forced off the highway by some police cruisers. I tried to go around them, but couldn't find the detour. Talking this as a sign, I crashed at the closest inn I could find. 

This morning I was up at 8AM and out the door some half hour later. Breakfast at a Waffle House (closes thing that I could find that wasn't already serving burgers), coffee frmo the connected Tim Hortons, then back on the road.

I've been tanking every 400km. This marker leaves me with a quarter tank safety margin in the event there are no fuel stations around. So, at around 2, I was getting close to the 400km mark when I asked my GPS reciever where the closest gas station was. The answer was "Dale's Fieworks". For obvious reasons, I took the exit. As one miguht imagine, Dale's was not a gas station, but a fireworks warehouse. I went in, bought some firecrackers and other things that explode, tanked (elsewhere), and got back on the highwar. 

Writing this, I'm in a Steak and Shake diner in Lebnon, MO, some 375km from Tulsa OK which is where I hope to spend the night (to stay on track with my Monday arrival at VERITAS). I've done enough Westward travelling to give me an extra hour of daylight, at least, so the only thing keeping me from getting there is potentially fatigue, but I'm not worried, there's enough "real fruit" in this strawberry milkshake I just had to keep an army of six year olds moving for a week. As much as I like diners, I'm becomming a bit oversaturated. I actually thought this place was a steakhouse, but had sat down before I noticed that they were a cheap burger joint. 

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The day after that I drove through Oklahoma and New Mexico, and I drove by the Tom Stafford Air and Space Museum 9and obviously went in) and past the Very Large Array (which I also visited). Two panoramas are included with this entry. 

This week the weather was really bad, thunder and lightning. We hadn't had a clear night before last night. We're finally going to be able to take some good measurements tonight; we're going to make a measurement of the reflectivity of the mirrors of one of the telescopes. 

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Shortly after I finished that sentence, we went outside to take the data and for the second time, we were unable to get the telescope to slew in azimuth (side to side). This was strange because twice now the telescope had been checked out during the day, and twice at night it just wanted nothing to do with pointing at a target. 

So, we drove up the mountain and parked at the Bowl dorms, had a beer and went to bed. This morning, I got an email from one of the VERITAS directors. We had left the telescope exactly as we had used it, so that if we hadn't plugged something in, for example, he'd be able to point to it and blame our issues on it. This was not the case, he had no issue slewing the telescope around. 

We're not quite sure what's going on, but tonight one of the experts is going to stick around until we start to take data to see if the problem crops up again. 

So, tonight we're going to try and make the measurement again, take some measurements to test the alignment of Telescopes 2, and then finally take some data so that we can align the mirrors on T4. All in all, it'll probably be a busy night.