hey doodz, summer update

Similarly to a few other Stadium members, I’ve spent my summer starting up with a real, honest-to-goodness research project. At the moment, my main task is helping gear up for a test in early August of a system that uses a laser frequency comb to calibrate an infrared spectrograph. This will (hopefully) enable us/someone to build a spectrograph that can detect sub-m/s radial velocity shifts (from an Earth-sized planet) in M-dwarfs (the most common type of star, they are cool and small). I’m pretty excited about the synthesis of a laser physics project and a planet hunting project that I’m getting into, and spending a few weeks in August at the Hobby-Eberly telescope in Texas will be fun. I’ve also been enjoying the vastly increased amount of free time I’ve been having this summer. “Vast” because any free time is like an infinityfold increase over zero.

So I’ve gotten to spend plenty of time outside the astronomy building lately, and I’ve done some pretty neat stuff. First and foremost, I accompanied Scuba Girl on a trip to Ireland a few weeks ago, and it was awesome. It was only rainy/cloudy for two of the eight days we were there, and it was like the Irish didn’t know what to do. Many had old “summer” clothes that looked like they were from the 90’s, and the majority of them were suffering from varying degrees of sunburn. But they were quite happy, and everyone we met was very friendly.

So we drove around, mainly around the western coast. We hiked around the Ring of Kerry region (beautiful, but not how you would imagine Ireland), visited Galway (a cooler city than Dublin, in my opinion), saw the Hill of Tara (with the oldest man-made thing I will probably ever see: the 5000 year-old Mound of Hostages), visited the Guinness brewery (overdone, but the gravity bar at the top gives free Guinness pints and has a gorgeous 360degree view of Dublin), and ate/drank in plenty of good pubs with good music. The coolest part, for me, was being in a place that has more than 300ish years of history. And it was hard to forget that history, as you could hardly throw a rock without hitting some ancient church/castle/monastery.






After I’ve got back from that, I started research in earnest. Of note recently: last week the astro department here held their annual “Astro Fest,” concurrently with the gigantic Central PA Arts Festival. We had about 1600 people go through, playing with the telescopes, going to presentations, and doing the kids activities. It was a really fun outreach event, and it was really fun for me to talk to kids (and adults) who have self-selected to come learn/talk about astronomy. A very different tone of conversation than you get used to, talking to only astronomers and people taking astro classes. Also, I got to make a giant tub of oobleck (corn starch + water), which was amazingly entertaining. If you’ve never played with this stuff before, I strongly recommend it. If you can build a big enough tub to walk on, let me know and I’m flying out to play with it.

I also went whitewater rafting for the first time (Ohiopyle Park), where I got to be the “captain” of my raft and miraculously no one died. One of my friends got launched off on the first rapid, but we hauled him back on, and after that we were good.

Finally, this past Sunday, two friends and I impulsively decided it would be a good idea to participate in a biathlon. We paid $20, drove down to the Altoona Pistol/Rifle Club, and ran a 5k with two stops for target shooting. I can hardly run without falling over, and I certainly can’t shoot, but it was a blast. My final time was something like 26:48, and I hit 3/5 targets prone and 2/5 standing. As you might imagine, it’s not easy to aim properly when you’re breathing hard. The top guy had about a 19:50, which I can’t even comprehend. That’s amazing for running alone, let alone the facts that it was a difficult course and there were stops for shooting. Obviously, he hit all his targets and didn’t have to run any penalty loops.

Ok that’s enough from me. I’m off. I hope everyone is having a great summer.
One more thing actually: we swam masters with a guy that was 50 yesterday, and he kicked all of our asses. For example, I was doing about 1:20-1:25 100m frees, and he was wasting me. Holy shit I hope I’ll have that kind of speed when I get old.