2007 September 18
Long weekend driving undergraduates down to Lick and showing them how to use the Nickel. It was fun, but driving to the top of Mt. Hamilton and back twice is a bit draining. But, while I’m not quite sure from what level of experience the students are all starting, I’ll pretend that a lot of them were driving research-class telescopes for the first time. It’s pretty rewarding to be the one helping them do that.
Monday off to recover.
Wrote up a draft of the transit photometry lab today. I was fairly happy with what I put together, but haven’t sat down and really thought through the organization and the pedagogy. (Which is a word that makes me uncomfortable for some reason, but happens to be appropriate here. Maybe it’s too close to “pedophile”?) I would have spent more time on that today, but I figured it made more sense to send it off to Geoff to see if what I was doing fit his ideas so far. No point spending a lot of time massaging the content if he’s going to rearrange it significantly.
Kind of ran out of pressing things to do after that. I’d run through the lab, but we don’t have the data and I need to hear back from Geoff on his revisions. As best as I can think of, I’m kind idling on ATA work until I go up to Hat Creek on Thursday. Spent a tiny bit of time on optional programming stuff but at the moment I’d rather go home than stay late doing that. So, let’s do that.