FYI

FYI, the drive from Roswell to Houston is quite possibly the worst thing I have ever had to do, ever. This includes the incident with the septic tank. 

It was all worth it though. Let's start at the beginning.

I pulled up at a Super 8 because I saw a sign that indicated that it had wifi available (little did I know that it was 3.99 a night, wtf). I promptly fell asleeep on the bed fully clothed, as driving 1205km in 12 hours will totally take it out of you. It was usually too hot inside to keep the windows up, and too cold and loud with the window2s down (west Texas has an 80mph speed limit) so the drive was miserable. Not to mention that no matter *when* you start, you're going to be driving at night, the days are too short nowadays. 

You must be asking, "but Sean, how could anything be worth it at such a cost?". The answer was today. This summer, in Erice, I met up with someone who works in ISS operations, in the Solar Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG) who offered to give me a visit of the Johnson Space Center ( a detail that I'm certain has been mentioned in this blog at least once or twice before ). 

So, this morning I wake up (quite miserable, the drive last night was *that* bad) and make my way to the JSC. I find the building where I'm supposed to pick up my ID / access badge, only to find out that not all the paperwork had been done. While waiting, my contact and I crossed the street to the Rocket Park, home of a Saturn V rocket. 

I knew it was big, but I was not prepared for what I saw; it really blew me away. I'm going back tomorrow to get some pictures, and just to get the feel for it again. They also have a Redstone and Little Joe rocket nextby for a sense of scale. The difference between sub-orbital and orbital flight isn't very much, but holy crow the difference between orbital and lunar is gigantic. 

I visited the ISS control room (from the observation deck) and then got to go up to the Apollo-era control room. Buttons, pneumatic tubes, the works. It was like being back in the 60s (not that I would know what they were like in the first place). 

So, SRAG monitors the sun for activity that might be dangerous to astronauts onboard ISS, and they have their own control staetion, albeit it is not housed in the control center, for understandable reasons. I got to see their stationa dn then my contact and I headed to (what I think was) building 7 which houses full sized mock-ups of ISS modules, Soyuz velssels, one full sized orbiter, the nose section of another, even a few Orion capsules (may they rest in peace...) and a rotary joint for the solar panels (probably there for the incident from a few years ago). 

I wandered around looking for 3 different breweries in Houston that my GPS reciever says exist but my eyes do not. I got to "admire" the highways for about three hours before ending up in BJ's Restorant and Brewery, a pretty nice place with a hug beer selection- 8 beers brewed in-house, Trappist beers imported from Belgium, and a plethora of others. Their beer is decent for a resto-brewery (as opposed to a Brewpub, this place is like a Cheesecake Factory crossed with a Les Trois Brasseurs), But I'm going to have to find something else to draw my attention, there is no free wifi here (for all you people looking down on me right now, you'd be looking for an internet fix, too, were you alone. 

What an adventure. I might also get to have lunch with a crew member from STS-131 tomorrow, but the details are still uncertain. I will visit the JSC visitor's center tomorrow ("Space Center Houston") and try to get a good night's sleep; the next day I make a B-line for Huntsville, home of the Marshall Spaceflight Center (and Space Camp USA). It's another 1200km. I have a sneaking suspicion that it will be another incident where I drive a horrible number of kilometers before doing something really awesome. 

While I have 2 full days in Houston, I only have 1 in Huntsville. I will be meeting my sister in Cleveland on Friday. We'll scout out the Great Lakes Science Center, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and then head on home on the Monday (7 days from now). I can feel that my tires are balding, if there's any snow at all the drive will take me many hours instead of "only" twelve.... I have a sneaking suspicion that I will taking advantage of a certain 300-minute energy boosting product that night. 

Data!

The past couple weeks have gone really well. I finished my detector and was able to start taking some preliminary data. My photmoeter is really just a high time resolution rate meter with many input channels (I have 8 active and can run up to 14 with some slight modifications). Apparently, a multi-input rate meter does not typically exist in the market. One of my colleges here at VERITAs needed such a device in order to determine some base characteristics of some new pixels that were installed in the camera of Telescope 3 (in preparation for a major overhaul of all the cameras that will take place in ~2012).

He was pleased to hear that my photometer, while not quite ready for taking astrophysical data, was more than ready to do the simple task of keep track of the rates on each of the pixels. The procedure was simple: Install my device and calculate the rates for a variety of different trigger thresholds. A trigger threshold is the minimum size of a signal that we require in order to register a 'hit'. If the threshold is set too low, we will trigger on electronic noise and light from the night sky, if it is too high, there will be too few incoming photons and it will take too long to acquire data. Hence, we must find the middle where we're not triggering on electronic noise or night sky background, but the threshold is also low enough to provide enough statistics. This measurement is called an "L1 Bias Curve".

After a few nights of L1 Bias Curve-ing, I caught a lucky break. There was about 45 minuts of moonless time available, which is below the cutoff for which VERITAS starts gamma-ray observations. Typically, one uses this time to take calibration data, which is often not as involved as taking gamma-ray data, but the 45 minute window was right before the Sun came up, from 5 - 5:45AM, and no one wants to stay up that late to get 45 minutes of calibration data.

Considering that I wasn't going to get *any* dark time at all, I got permission to take data during this time and took 45 minutes worth of observations on the Crab Nebula. THere is a well known ~33ms optical pulsar inside the Crab nebula, but it is very faint (Magnitude 16.5, this corresponds to something like 4000 photons / m^2 / s reaching the Earth in the wavelength range that VERITAS is sensitive to) and hence very difficult to observe with a traditional optical telescope. VERITAS has such a huge collection area, ~100m^2 that it makes it feasible to detect the pulsar for long enough runs.

I calculated that in order to get a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio (ie, 5 sigma for a detection) VERITAS needs about 2 seconds of data in order to detect the optical pulsar. The catch is that a VERITAS time detector doesn't have alot of live time (ie, it can take data for ~200ns at a time for at most 500 times a second - this correspinds to the detector being 'alive' for about 1/100th of a percent of the time). This means that in order to get two seconds of live time, one needs to take about 5.5 hours of continuous data. This is a significant amount of data, and VERITAS time is already oversubscribed by a factor of about 5 (ie, we have requests for 5 times more time than we actually have available). Conversely, my detector has 100% live time, I can continuously take data, so 2 seconds of live time is 2 seconds of data. This makes detecting things like the Crab Optical Pulsar much easier, but the devil is in the details.

Remember I was talking about thresholds? Well, the light coming from the Crab comes at various intensities, so the magnitude of the pulsar light could often dip below my threshold, which I have set so that I'm not triggering on noise. This essentially just amounts to needing to take longer data runs in order to get a detection. Assuming I'm only triggering on 1% of the Crab photons (the others being too low intensity), I still only need about 90 seconds of data. So, 45 minutes should be much more than enough to get a detection, unless I'm capturing some absurdly small fraction of the incoming photons.

I haven't had the chance to analyze any code just yet, I've been too busy with other things, such as working on the actual alalysis code and filtering out sources of noise (or at least trying to, it is very nontrivial to do so). I have determined that there's a 1kHz source of noise somewhere in the VERITAS system. Usually, VERITAS operates with a threshold higiher than that of the of the noise, so it's not a major issue, but I am operating with slightly lower thresholds that put me right on the border of being in the area where I can pick it up.


So that's work aside. I'm currently sitting in a garage having my car worked on in preparation for my depature from the Whipple Observatory on Saturday. Just some routing stuff, but I'm also having the timing belt changed. It's not due just yet, but I'd rather not have it break while I'm somewhwere with a population density of zero.

Stops on the way home include the Johnson Space Center (Houston), the Marshall Spaceflight Center (Huntsville, AL) and the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. I'm really excited for these, but particularly I was invited to the Johnson Space Center by someone who works in ISS operations. I got word yesterday that it'll be ready by the time I'm in Houston.

Well, I have to finish (/start) packing up my room in preparation for my departure. There's US Thanksgiving dinner on the Mountain soon, too, I heard a rumor that there is 40 pounds of turkey lurking somewhere.

Delays

So, what have I done since I've been in Vegas...

Correction. What have I done since the last time I updated this blog.
It was a crazy busy month. Let's start with my trip to Las Vegas for
my birthday, shall we?

My first night I wantered the Strip a little, made my way from my
hotel (New York- New York) to Bill's Gambling House and Saloon. It's
only two blocks or so but those are not small blocks. I had originally
intended on staying at Bill's, so I went in to check it out. It's a
nice western-style place. I sat down at a slot machine and won a
couple beans, and then made my way around in an attempt to find a
kitchen was still open (at this point it was kind of late).

As it turns out, the closest was this avergae looking restorant in my
hotel, so I got some particularly tasty and inexpensive ribeye before
miandering about somewhat in the vicinity of the slots. Lured in by my
previous luck, I sat down at a machine and began pulling the lever. By
1:30 I was up five hundred dollars. Epic success.

The next morning I got up and drove myself to the Las Vegas Gun Store,
where I proceded to fire off some automatic weapons in celebration of
the previous night's victory. That went as well as I could have hoped
(ie, it was fun and I didn't shoot myself). The next stop was a local
brewpub. I had a tasty plate of what was some sort of chicken, mashed
potato, asparagus with poutine-sauce concoction (it looked much better
than it sounds and was very tasty). I picked up a brewery pint glass
and then made my way back to the Strip.

I wanted to see the Blue Man Group, so I found the Venetian, navigated
my way through the maze of shops and indoor canals, and then finally
fount the Blue Man Group Theatre. If you don't already know, the first
five rows from the stage are referred to the 'poncho zone'. The
principle is that within this zone you can get splashed with paint and
whatnot from the performance. After having seen the show from this
position, I highly suggest that if you do go see the Blue Man Group,
to see it from the poncho zone. At no point in time was I ever in
danger of getting splashed (I was in the fifth row from the front).
Judging from the amount of splash I saw, I don't really think that
even the front row seats are in any real danger. The show was very
interactive, it was really great. Alot of climbing through the crowd,
a couple 'volen-tolds', and the music was epic. I would definitely go
again.

The next day I drove to the Hoover Dam and did the Power Plant tour.
It wasn't expensive (12$), but it was really short, only about 30
minutes, and you didn't see much more than the power generators on the
Nevada side of the Dam and a room above the passageway where the water
flows from the collection towers to the generator room. It was neat to
see, sure, but I was expecting a bit more. There is, however, another
tour available for 30$ that allows you to visit "two additional places
in the Dam". I doubt it'd be worth it, after having seen the Power
Plant tour.

Walking over the Dam was my favorite part. You can walk all the way
across and see the famous winged figures. I don't really believe in
luck, but I rubbed their toes anyways, as a symbolic gesture more than
anything.

That night I went to see Penn and Teller. I showed up at the Rio a few
hours early and assumed that the Rio would be like my hotel in that
the interior would be filled with restorants and other things to do. I
was unfortunately wrong. I found one pub, had a very reasonably priced
Guinness, and then walked over to the Penn and Teller theatre. THere
was a Starbucks across the hallway (closed, way to go Rio), so I
plumped down in one of the chairs and waited for the gates to open.

The show started at nine, and there was a one hour jazz "show" before
the start of the act. There was one pianist (I cannot remember his
name unfortunately) and an upright bassist. Though "cleverly"
disguised in a hat and using the bass to block his face from most
viewers, I determined that this was, in fact, Penn Jillette.

Penn & Teller were fantastic. Prior to the show, we were asked to
inspect a wooden box and sign an envelope that would be used during
the show. I did so, took a good hard look for anything hokey in the
design, but to no avail. Once we had all retaken our seats, the lights
dimmed, the spotlights came on, and Penn walked out onto the stage,
Teller popped out of the box, and the show began. Awesome.

Afterwards, they made themselves available for autographs and
pictures, I got the guide that came with my seat (4th row from the
stage) signed and had my picture taken with both of them. It was
really great. If you are a Penn and Teller fan, or not, the show is
very good. I quickly retired to bed, as the next day (yesterday, from
my current point of view) was going to be very busy.

At 5AM my alarm went off and I quickly got ready to go on my
airplane-helicopter-pontoon boat tour of the Grand Canyon West Rim. We
boarded what I think was a Dash-6 and got a nice arial view of the
Hoover Dam and Lake Mead from about 8000 feet altitude. We landed at
the West Rim airport, had out safety briefing ("this is how you put on
a seatbelt") and boarded a Bell Jet-Ranger. We flew down to the
bottom, about 1.2km, and disembarked. The ride was very smooth, much
more than I was expecting.

On the same tour as me were alot of Chinese tourists. Most of them
spoke no english at all, and there were one or two that spoke a few
words (yes, no, toaster). This made everything we did both incredibly
difficult and usually incredibly funny. All the aircraft are loaded by
weight, so you have to stay int he same seat as you were assigned to
keep the aircraft balance correct. This is a very hard concept to
depict, but we managed.

The tour was now officially over, but I had two hours to wander around
the west rim. I had lunch at the Native's outpost (some sort of really
salty beef with potatoes) and went and sat out on the rim. There's not
much else to tell, apart from that it was really pretty. About an hour
later, we flew back to Boulder City and were bussed back to our
respective hotels.

At this point I was seriously running out of steam, so I made my way
back to the hotel, changed into less dusty clothes, and went out for
my last night. I made my way to the Rockbar, I think it's called, and
bought a 100oz margarita in a yard glass that had its own strap and
walked to the Bellagio fountains. I guess it was cliche, sipping
margaritas while watching the fountains, but it was a good way to go
out, I think.

The drive home was eventful to say the least. Well, trying to get on
the road was. It was mighty complicated. Another post's worth. Gods,
another one at least.

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