Back to the UK

We had PULSE@Parkes session from Cardiff in December. Rob was in the UK following the dotAstromony conference. He decided to take advantage of the both of us being in Europe and ran our first international session. It was run at and in collaboration with Cardiff University and involved students from the local schools.
My trip to Cardiff was the first long drive in my new car which I had bought just a few weeks earlier. It's a Volvo, what a surprise! I'm very pleased with it. It eats up the mile, sorry kilometres, on the autobahns, is quick enough that I can overtake safely on the crazy German roads and is surprisingly frugal. I drove through Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France before taking the tunnel to the UK. Once on the other side I had to concentrate hard to drive on the left. I was finding it hard going before I stopped off at Doug's for a quick pit-stop. It was just a flying visit but it was great to catch up for a bit. By the time I left I felt infinitely better and the rest of the drive was easy.

The PULSE@Parkes session went well and I think the students enjoyed it. We has a bit of local press too (albeit rather inaccurate). It was nice to meet up with Rob again and catch up with the latest gossip from down-under. It was also a good excuse to visit the family. Despite passing right by Nick and Ceri the timing meant I couldn't pop in, a shame but we knew we'd be meeting up at Christmas.

A last trip to the telescopes

Last week was spent on one last observing trip to the telescopes. First up was a few days at Narrabri observing with ATCA. I drove up with Vik in one of the work Priuses. I'm not the exactly the biggest fan of the hybrids but they're ok, naturally I'd prefer the usual V6 Commodore which has plenty of grunt. However the box of batteries has enough power to overtake the B-doubles and made it all the way on one tank.

Using ATCA we were observing at millimetre wavelengths over a long baseline. I'm more a of a low-frequency single-dish kinda guy so this was new territory for me. At these frequencies we actually had to worry about the seeing and pointing errors, it's practically optical! Also we were using the brand new CABB system which replaced the old correlator that I was used to. Surprisingly the set-up wasn't too difficult and (with a lot of help from the locals) the observations went smoothly despite the occasional wind-stow.

After I'd said goodbye to ATCA I drove off down to Parkes where Ramesh and Jonathon had already started our PPTA observations. I love that drive, there's little traffic, the Warrumbungles are beautiful and there's plenty of long straight bits to overtake on. I did have a near miss when a large section of angle-iron fell off the back of a truck but otherwise it was a relaxing drive.

I arrived at Parkes just in time for the wind to drop and observations restart. They went pretty smoothly and I took the opportunity between scans to turn on the floodlights and take some photos. I also visited the visitor centre several times to stock up on Parkes related merchandise :-). Marta and Maura were there and we had fun recounting Parkes stories in the evenings.

We also had a PULSE@Parkes run but this was from VSSEC so Rob, George and Jono (as in Jonathan not Jonathon) had gone down to Melbourne to cover it. On this run we had the students tweeting what they were doing. We had several astronomers following and even had a bit of press interest. It seemed to go very well and the kids were very enthusiastic.

It was an uneventful drive back but I stopped to take a photo of an old analogue railway signal sat all on its own by the side of the road. I always look out for it between Bathurst and Orange.

I was a bit sad leaving Parkes for the last time before I move to Germany. But I will be back before too long, counting the minutes until shift change! Still it won't quite be the same.

The Parkes open day

I spent my second weekend in a row at Parkes, this time it was the Parkes open day. Given all the visitors, helicopters and media broadcasting the RFI environment was bound to be terrible but George managed to persuade Vik and me that it was worth trying to get some observations for one of our projects.

As we gathered for the briefing on the Saturday morning there were already people queuing to get in. Some had come from Victoria and Queensland. It wasn't long before the line for the telescope tours was stretching around the telescope and was 3 hours long. Despite that everyone seemed to be very cheerful and enjoyed the tours. We were in the control room, one of the last stops on the tour and we became expert in explaining what we were observing in 60 seconds or less! George, Vik and I took turns talking to the relentless tours, doing the observations and checking e-mail.

There were stands from local groups, science outreach people from further afield, shows in the 3D theatre, walks around the grounds, science talks in the marquee and even a bouncy castle!

I gave a live interview on ABC radio in the morning. I was surprised that it lasted 5 mins or more rather than the usual sound-bite. Later a punter from Dubbo told me that he'd heard this fella on the radio talking about pulsars - fame at last! There was a lot of media interest with all the major TV stations sending at least one crew. The ABC arrived in their helicopter.

By the end of the first day we were all knackered. There was a BBQ and bonfires at the woolshed for the volunteers. We stayed late drinking beer (purely medicinal, to sooth our sore throats), telling tall stories and jokes.

The next day I had a talk to give at the main marquee and it was nearly packed. There were lots of good questions and interest and another visitor had heard my radio interview. It was great to meet so many people who are genuinely interesting in what we do.

Later on I took a helicopter ride around the telescope. It was a tiny thing with bubble like windows, you could feel every tweak of the controls and gust of wind. It was great to see the telescope from a different angle. It looked much more steeply curved than it does from the ground. I took a few photos and even some video. It was a great trip and has got me thinking about flying lessons again.

We drove through the night on Sunday to get back to Sydney and I decided that Monday morning just wasn't going to happen. It was a long, exhausting but fun weekend. More than 6,500 people visited and more than 3,000 of those took the tour through the telescope. And we may even get some data out of it!

A surprise visit to Parkes

I had a quick and unexpected trip to Parkes this weekend. I wasn't expecting to be going but Dunc and Maura had managed to get hold of the director's time during the weekend. As they're in the US and John was busy I volunteered to cover the observations. Luckily I managed to get a car and a room in the lodge despite only having a day's notice.

I arrived on Friday evening and found that the Italian contingent were doing their polarisation survey that requires the dish to make repeated slews across the sky. Above-left is a 60 second integration (sorry, exposure in camera speak) taken towards the end of one of the slews. The scene is lit by the nearly-full Moon at the bottom left of the picture. I took several other photos (e.g. above-right) that were more carefully composed but that first one is still my favourite.

I left on Sunday evening and had a very quick drive back through the night. There were a few close encounters of the roo-kind but thankfully no collisions.

An eventful trip to Parkes

I recently spent a few days observing at Parkes for the PPTA project. Trips to the telescope usually produce some good stories but this was an eventful trip even by Parkes' standards.

The first morning when I went to have breakfast there was a full size traffic cone in front of each of the dinning room doors. Confused I went to the kitchen where I was told that we couldn't use the dinning room due to, I quote, "maggots falling from the ceiling." It seems that something had died in the roof space and the maggots that were living off the something were eating through the ceiling and falling into the room below. As if free-falling maggots weren't enough occasionally one would get into a nearby air-conditioning vent which, when the unit cycled on, was propelled at high speed across the room.

At this point I though I had my Parkes story of the trip and my Facebook post on the subject got quite a response.

Then a couple of nights later RM turned up to relieve me at the customary 4am shift change. "You'll have to run the gauntlet of the bogongs," he said. Bogongs are large moths that are well known for their migration south in the spring occasionally swamping Sydney. They range in size from about the size of your hand to the size of a bird. It turns out that they migrate back north in the autumn. The lights of the telescope had attracted quite a swarm and they matted the ground around the door. The (white) car was parked under a light and was covered to the extent that I had to shoo them off the windscreen before driving back.

The next day I woke briefly at 6am as the sun was rising and saw that the bogongs had moved on leaving the ground littered with the bodies of those that had not made it through the night. The birds were feasting and by the time I got up the only evidence the previous night's infestation was the occasional broken wing blowing in the wind and some very fat birds.

That evening I was on the night shift when an alarm sounded and the telescope ground to a halt. The computer warned of a loss of tracking of the master equatorial (ME). The ME is a small telescope in the heart of Parkes that points a laser beam; the radio telescope follows this beam. I restarted but only got a few minutes of observations before the same error occurred. I climbed up to the ME room to investigate.

The telescope was slewed over to a low elevation so the light in the ME room was practically at floor level and not much help. Using my torch I look for any possible obstruction. There were a few cobwebs around the ME, not enough to cause a problem but I grabbed the cobweb brush
(left in the room for just such occasions) and cleaned the webs away. As I was poking the brush into the tube down which the laser shines something large and flappy shot out of the tube brushing my hard-hat. Heroically I dropped the torch, the brush and slid down the ladder to the junction room.

I recovered my composure and what was left of my dignity and climbed back up to the ME room. While it sounded like a bird I thought it was probably a bogong trapped in the room and attracted to the laser light. In the dimly lit room I managed to spot a bird, not a moth, perched on a girder. A moth I could squash (even if it is big) but what do you do with a bird? It was a surreal moment. I was standing in the centre of the telescope in the middle of the night trying to convince a bird to leave using a manci old brush and a torch when I suddenly realised; "This is my job!" I turned all the lights on in the junction room and every time the bird landed I prodded it with the brush and eventually it did go into the junction room and then out of the telescope.

Once the bird was evicted the observations went smoothly and we finished our run. Still it was quite a trip.