So I've been observing for the last 7 nights on Kitt Peak outside of Arizona (one of my favorite places :) ). I like to do observing diaries so people can see what sorts of fun things ;) we astronomers do whilst observing. Pictures are good too :)

Erika's 2008 Observing Diary

(p.s. I'm a bit irritated I can't seem to get it on my Vanderbilt website - too restrictive :( - my webspace is not hosted by the physics department like my CHARA website is)

Peeples of my friends list! :)

I have another education research thingy for you! This one involves filling out a questionnaire, not pictures of the Earth and Moon :) This is actually for my education research partner. He already has a bunch of teachers that have done this questionnaire and he needs some general public :) As I know more general public people (i.e., non-Ph.Ds and non-teachers) than he does, he asked me to help distribute :)

Requirements:
- You have never taught a course before (K-12, college, etc) (this is the important one - if you are unsure you meet this qualification, ask me about it)
- You can manipulate a Word document in some program
- You have 40ish minutes to spend doing this

If you want to participate, let me know and I shall send you the document!

Hi there LJers :)

I'd like your help doing a project that my education research partner and I have been thinking about for a while. We're studying how science museums and planetaria and various institutions that display models/diagrams of astronomical objects represent size and scale. We need pictures of how places are doing it - I can only get to so many places but I know people all over so it would be so much fun to get as many as possible!!

Here's what to do:

1. Get a digital camera (you could use a cell phone camera IF IT TAKES DECENT PICTURES that you can download).

2. Go to a science museum, planetarium, university, anywhere that has models/mock-ups/diagrams of the Earth/Moon system.

3. Take a picture of said model of the Earth/Moon system (if it is a model with two spheres, please try to get them as far apart as possible meaning get a picture from the side). We need to be able to measure the sizes of the two spheres and the farthest distance between them.

4. Take a picture of any text that pertains to the model - we need to see if it says "Not to Scale" or anything like that.
(( 4.5 - if there is a model with the Earth and Sun in it too, get that also! :) ))

5. Send the pictures to my LiveJournal account (dancinastrophys@livejournal.com). Please include the name of the place you got the picture from.

Even if you think I already have pictures from a certain location, send them anyway - too much data is better than not enough. You are also perfectly free to pass this on!


This is an on-going project so should you travel in the near future you can contribute even more! :)
An ulterior motive is that I like to get people out and about to the science purveyors in their fair cities ;)

Guess what I'm updating from???!!!

My shiny new MacBook that grant money helped me get :)

WHEEEE!!!! :)

I saw my very first albino Asian person today...

Such a sighting reminded me of the story my family tells about my maternal grandpa. During World War II he ended up stationed in Beijing to help keep China out of Japanese hands. Apparently they didn't have to do much but stand around. My grandpa was a 6'4" blond and the Chinese just were in awe. To hear the family tell it the Chinese thought of him as a god. People would take him around in rickshaws and show him the city and bring him food and generally be extremely nice. I had asked Grandpa about his time there and he had nothing but good feelings about the Chinese people - he never cared for the government there, but the people he liked.
Grandpa has been dead for a few years but I remember him fondly :) He could always tell an interesting story.

Nashville pumps dry after panic about rumor of no gas

OH MY GOD PEOPLE!!!

So, I myself did get caught in the fallout of this here news story.

Normally, I get gas on Tuesdays, it's just what I do. This past Tuesday I didn't - I had an awesome show to attend, had a band as houseguests, people were freaking out over Hurricane Ike so getting gas... I figured I'd get it later.
On the way into work/school on Friday, I noticed that there were stations with bags on the pumps and at some stations, there were lines. Odd, but I figured I'd get gas later that night. My gas warning light illuminated... I meandered by several stations, all had bags on the pumps. Due to people panicking, I could not remedy my gas-low situation!

This weekend I wanted to go down to Atlanta to see Marcia Ball (awesome boogie-woogie/blues pianist) and hang for a while but NO! I didn't have enough gas to get out of town to get enough gas! All I needed was a couple of gallons...

ARGH!!!
Nashvillians, why do you have to be the crazy ones! The ONLY crazy ones!

P.S. I did find some gas from a Sunday delivery in my neighborhood, I now have a few gallons, but it's a bit late for ATL fun... Sigh.

"See, you'll be sprightly and frisky well into your dotage!"

I luv the Olympics :)

This weekend I be visiting MissAngela and DerHugh in Fort Myers, FL :) Yayz! We've gone belly dancing, to the beach, out to eat, and to a variety of ethnic grocery stores thus far :) We're gonna go out tonight for clubbiness :)

Luckily they have little objection to watching Olympics while we're hanging out at the condo :)

Thus far we've seen an incredible and extravagant spectacle of an opening ceremony (those printing blocks? OMG!!! O_o ), equestrian dressage, beach volleyball, indoor volleyball, soccer, badmiton (holy cow fast), team handball (quite interesting!), rowing, cycling, weightlifting (goodness not for long)... :)
And it's only the first day!!!

The seester and I have been chatting a bunch about it - we've loved Olympics for so long :) There will not be much sleeping over the next fortnight - I hope that the NBC streaming video servers are up to the task!

OMGYAY

And I've now entered the world of Facebook!

I have a Myspace page too.

(yes, I haven’t posted much recently, but here we go!)

So MissDancingAstrophysicist, how did your week go?

Well, in looking back things, it was a good week, but in thinking harder, it had some parts one could consider majorly sucky.

( Why whatever do you mean?? )

Southern Chile is not the best place to be right now...

You HAVE to see this gallery of pictures of the Chaiten volcano during a lightning storm - IT IS LIKE THE DEVIL HIMSELF HAS TAKEN FORM!!!!
(there's 13 amazing pictures to see there)

An example:


by Carlos Gutierrez (UPI/Landov)
Found on the journal of the collector-of-interesting-photos, Missriotclitshave

Luckily for we astronomers, it is too far south to affect the telescopes of middle/northern Chile :)

I just found out that one of my favorite musicians died last night. He was only 28.

I first saw blues guitarist Sean Costello on the enthusiastic recommendation of my friend Dave and man was he right! His music is highly dancable, he loved to play, he loved to watch we dancers (I always liked to give him a little extra hip-pop action while dancing so I could get the wink ;) ). He was also a really nice guy who loved to talk to people and was always curious about the goings-on in astronomy (though we never got to talk as much as either of us would like).
He was supposed to play two shows this weekend in Atlanta and I was really thinking about going down there to go see him.

I truly LOVED going to see him play - he embodied all that live music is about: heart, soul, dancing, guitarists making wild faces, and most of all, FUN.

Here's one of my favorite songs of his (a cover): Mamma Talk To Your Daughter
and an excellent example of his original music: Hard Luck Woman
One can find several great videos of him on YouTube (showing guitar prowess and also fun).

Rumor has it that it was an overdose of some kind.

I wish I'd known him better and I will miss his music and his presence.
I hope that his soul is resting peacefully or whatever it does :)

So I've been participating in a belly dancing class through Vanderbilt this semester. As such, we are part of the year-end performances - the first was tonight, the second will be tomorrow.

It's really an excellent show - all of the dancers are quite good - modern, ballet, tap, Indian...

One of the dancers in several of the other numbers talked to me this evening, commenting that we belly dancers looked so beautiful, exotic, and interesting :) Then she said, "Oh, you're the one with the great stomach! I just kept watching it at the run-through - I need to figure out how to do that..."

That was totally awesome :)
((preen))

And I have great eye make-up on tonight :)

So I use Google Calendar and I needed to make an event.
Today, there is a button that says "I'm feeling lucky..." - sounds interesting...

Now, at 5 p.m. Friday evening, I have a date with Angelina Jolie ;)
AWESOME!!

Due to the facts that I have awesome (and rather bright) stars to study and Vanderbilt is part of the SMARTS Consortium (some universities running "small" telescopes) and I have a cool advisor with money to spend, I got to go to Chile to observe!!

I'm using the 1.5 meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO) (CTIO in general is run by the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO)). My telescope is a SMARTS telescope. Usually, this telescope is run using queue observing - you send in a target list and they'll observe the object whenever there is time. However, as my stars can sometimes be difficult to deal with, it's nice for me to have a starting estimate of exposure times - I don't want the poor queue observers to have to figure my stars out (and they aren't supposed to).

Anyway, the journey to CTIO consists of this:
1. Fly to Santiago, Chile (connections often through Atlanta, Miami, or Dallas)
2. Fly to La Serena, Chile (takes about an hour)
3. Take a shuttle bus up to the mountain (1.5 hrs)

My journey was Nashville to Miami, layover for 4:50 hrs, Miami to Santiago, layover for 1.5 hrs, Santiago to La Serena for a grand total of 20 hours. However, it didn't quite work out that way...

( More, plus PICTURES, under the cut... )

I'm in Chile!! :)

YayZ!!

While waiting for a half-hour exposure to get done, I figured I'd better post about my observatory experience thus far. Then I realized I forgot the cable for my camera in my dorm room thus I cannot share any pictures yet :( Awww... But I promise I will :) I like writing while observing!

So I'm observing at the 1.5meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory outside of La Serena, Chile :) YAR!!! So awesomez! I have two nights of time while I'm here and then I get 3 more nights of "queue time" during which I send a target list to the peeps in charge and they will observe my stars at their leisure :) Thus I get to monitor stars I like to look at. My extra 3 nights will expire in July so I have time :)

On the morrow I shall post pictures and tell of my adventures thus far - I feel they need pics :)

P.S. Rascal Flatts totally sucks and are a bunch of poseurs OMG. O.M.G. NO SOUL DO THEY HAS.

Heh, here it is, Saturday night before I go to Chile (on Tuesday!) and I'm staying home and working on my target list ;) Heh :) It seems that the Cosmic Cosmicness has decided I'm to stay home this weekend as I developed one heck of a cold this week - fever, chest congestion, cough, stuffy/runny nose and everything! But I'm getting better now! I suspect it was wedding-related... Hmmmmm....

Perhaps those couple of days I spent in the desert air of Tucson, AZ this week helped out a bit ;) The desert is were people went to help with the disease of "consumption" - perhaps dry air helps all respiratory ailments?
(I was there for education research collaboration)

Back to the target list... So many possibilities, how shall I chose?

Last weekend former roomie/officemate/bellydancing partner MissAngela got married to DerHugh :) It was a beautiful ceremony and we all had a great time :)

( More AND PICTURES under the cut )

Doods, it is officially time to start facilitating skin cancer again! Cripes am I white! The plunging necklines that are rather popular these days (well, all days I suppose) really don't look good with a bit of tan and then blinding whiteness... Yessss, I shall tan...
And it's starting to get warm enough to do so in Nashville :) Well, on some days :p