A trip to Western Australia

OK, so this post is a bit out of sequence. This trip was actually about six weeks ago but I've only just uploaded the photos.

We had the Orange 2008 pulsar conference in Perth in 2009, somewhat late and geographically confused. The conference was hosted at Curtin university. Megan is now at Curtin and it was great to be able to catch up again.

Mike, George, Alberto and I had decided to take a few days extra at the end of the conference to go and see a bit of Western Australia. On Friday afternoon, after the conference ended we took a ferry to down the river to Freo. We arrived as the sun was setting and made our way to a lighthouse near the entrance to the port. We watched the sun set over the Indian ocean and it was pretty spectacular. We had dinner and a few beers before heading home. The train ride from Freo to Perth was surprisingly remanisient of the movie 'The last train from Freo' but with a couple of transport cops on-board there was no trouble.

The next day we checked out and headed north from Perth towards the pinnacles. None of us had had breakfast, planning to stop on the way. But places to stop are pretty few and far between once you leave Perth, so we kept driving through the bush into dark skies and lightening strikes. Just as the rain hit we saw a sign to the AIGO visitor's centre (the Australian gravitational wave detector). Since there was likely to be food and coffee there we followed the sign down a small road that's not on my GPS. We ordered some food and drinks and sat down. Moments later the power went out. As they couldn't open the till or make our orders we had to choose the cost equivalent in soft drinks and ice cream. So we sat in a gravitational wave visitor centre in the middle of nowhere, in the dark eating our breakfast of ice cream and Coke as the storm raged around us.

After breakfast we continued up to the coastal town of Lancelin. The weather was clearing and we took a walk along the beach. As we did we saw several dolphins swimming very close to the beach catching fish. We followed them up the beach we found a pub which was very reminiscent of an English country pub. George was feeling wealthy and had half a lobster. We had lunch in the garden looking out to sea before getting back on the road.

That evening we finally made it to the pinnacles. It was an amazing sight, a forest of rocks poking out of the sand. The first people to find it must have thought they'd landed on another world. We wandered around for ages taking more photos of pointy rocks that anyone could possibly want. Then we took our hire car on the driving route through the site. We weren't sure if we had pinnacle-damage cover but decided we'd probably be alright. We stayed and watched the sunset over the ocean before going to Cervantes to find somewhere to stay. Alberto, jelous of George's lunch-time lobster, had an enormous seafood platter for dinner. After after more beers we ended up lying on the beach looking at the stars.

On the last day George wanted to go and see the stromatolites, rock formations formed by bacteria over hundreds and thousands of years. So we headed off down a (very) corrugated road to a little lake where there were some short round rock formations. George was very excited by these and we walked around the whole lake to make sure we'd seen them all! After the exhilaration of stromatolite watching Alberto was in the mood for a swim so a final trip back to the beach before the long drive back to Perth.

Moving to Germany

For a while I've been considering several options for work after my contract at the ATNF runs out in September. It was not an easy decision but in the end MPIfR made me a offer that was too good to turn down.

So in September I'm moving to Bonn to work for the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie on a 5 year contract. They have a 100m telescope in nearby Effelsberg which is the 2nd largest fully-steerable radio telescope in the world. There is plenty of good work we can do with a telescope like that!

I've bought a 'Teach Yourself German' book in the hope that I'll be able to improve my atrocious, mostly-forgotten, school taught German. However I suspect that it will join my 'Learn to Speak French' book that I bought before going to Montréal - hardly read in the corner of the bookcase!

I'm looking forward to being long drive or a short flight away from the UK making it very easy to visit friends and family. You have been warned!

With three months to go I've got to start getting moving quotes and working out my ATNF 'exit strategy'. The advantage is that it should be at least 5 years before I have to do this again... I hope!

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.