2007 November 12
Tonight was a remote observing night for 120. For the first time in what feels like forever, the weather was cooperative. We were a bit delayed in getting started due to some organizational issues — basically a few communications gaps between us and Lick about what we could count on and how to get in touch with people. Now we know what the deal is with the particular problems we had, but there seem to be a lot of little things that pop up with remote observing. And they seem to typically be the kind of thing that you need to figure out how to deal with one at a time. Maybe after a few more (non-cloudy) runs things will smooth out though. Fingers crossed.
While the students were observing I reduced a bunch of broadband spectra data. I ran through my new dataset and, to my uncritical eye, things look really good. Looking forward to hearing what Geoff thinks. I get the feeling that if I was more meticulous about the analysis, I could really tighten up the results, too. It’s unclear to me whether that’s something that I’ll get the time to actually do. In the abstract, I think I’d like to spend that time, since I like the idea of producing work that’s nice and thorough and polished, but in practice that extra effort is really tedious, and hard. And despite my self- mythologizing, I don’t think I have a great track record of being too good about following through with going that extra mile. Well, I’ll talk to Geoff about how much time we want to spend on these results, and I’ll go from there.