2007 December 11
Observing on the CAT last night. Extremely clear skies, but also very windy. Fortunately, the winds were out of the north, which meant that the dome of the 3m telescope shielded me from almost everything. A few times I could see sources moving around the slit, presumably because the wind was pushing the siderostat around, but it was never enough to cause the guider to freak out. And as far as I can convince myself, the source moving will only hurt the telescope’s efficiency a bit, not mess with the data. The efficiency was great last night though and apparently the data look very good.
It’s pretty close to the solstice, so it was a long night: I was taking data for about 13 hours. While waiting for the CAT to integrate, I was busy working away on processing my ATA data. How productive!
Actually, the headline is a lie though. I actually don’t feel that tired today. I mean, hell, I’m still at work right now, and I don’t feel like I’m gonna die or flip out or anything. The ATA work came along very well today, though I was hoping to have a bit more data ready to analyze than I do. It feels close though.