Stupid Astronomer Tricks #13: Weak tea
Starting our final week!
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... When I was a graduate student, we were paid a stipend by the department, money that our professors had written into their grants to pay for students. Our income was $300 per month, spread over ten months. (Summer salaries were another story; if they existed at all.)
I'll just say, he's in this picture. And it wasn't me. The ten of us were the original class of grad students at the U of Arizona. Department of Planetary Scientists; circa 1975.
You could just about make ends meet on this salary so long as you didn't have pesky needs like doctors or dentists or anything unexpected. Most of us got by on the basis of coming from families with enough money to backstop us. No surprise that the overwhelming majority of us were white, male, and mostly Protestant... and mostly single.
But one of our cohort was happily married with a small baby at home. We knew their finances were very tight, even as his wife was working part time (baby and all). But just how tight finally hit me the day that I saw him making tea, and re-using a tea bag.
"I buy one box of tea a year. Each bag has to last a week," he explained.
"The tea must get kind of weak by the end of the week," I commented. "Especially because... um... so... tell me, why are you holding your used teabag over the sink, under running water from the faucet?"
"To clean it," he explained. "Look how it turns the water brown while I am rinsing it off!"
(He was... is... a theorist. Big name in the field now. With a good income.)
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Stupid Astronomer Tricks #12: Taking note
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... Many years ago, when there was only one telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, astronomers were expected to actually work inside the telescope dome at 15,000 feet rather than observing from a remote office somewhere down the hill. During that epoch, a famous astronomer went up Mauna Kea for the first time to observe.
(Cartoon by Ann Drogin, from an early edition of Turn Left at Orion)
Astronomers are very careful to keep detailed observing logs of what they observed, the weather conditions, etc.; also, they need to keep a record of which exposures were recording your target, which were standard stars, etc. It matters how high up in the sky your object was, that is to say how much atmosphere you were looking through, and in those days the time of each exposure was the data you needed to calculate the amount of "air mass" you were looking through.
The astronomer had been warned that working at high altitude might cause some problems, but as it happened he felt fine during the entire run. Convinced that he just had good "altitude genes" – perhaps explaining why he was such a better-than-average astronomer – he congratulated himself on an excellent observing run.
Unfortunately, his logbook said otherwise. Once he got back to sea level, he discovered that he could not understand anything he had written in the notebook!
Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
ⓜ By Design (Interview, and response)
(And Then I Wrote...)
Since this site began more than six years ago, every Thursday I have been publishing a reprint from my column "Across the Universe" in the British Catholic journal, The Tablet. I have finally gone through all of them (except for 2019's columns) and I've even re-published a few of the oldest ones that came out here before our readership had grown.
In order to let my backlog build up a bit, I am taking "Across the Universe" offline for 2020. Instead, I am republishing a selection of other articles that I have written an published in various places... often obscure.
I took this photo from a cablecar looking down on a rainforest outside Cairns, Australia... a site full of life as exotic as any on any planet...
Interview and Response: At an early Astrobiology conference (in 2005), the NASA online magazine Astrobiology did an interview of me; here's what they ran: (Click Here for the version on their site)
After this ran, someone wrote to me challenging me on a few of my points and wanting to know just what it was I meant... looking through my files I found the following, which it appears that I actually did send something in reply to them. The letter itself is long lost, so I have no idea whom it was I was replying to!
Here's what I prepared to send them:
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Stupid Astronomer Tricks #11: Flattening the field
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
Fr. Martin McCarthy with the Vatican's Schmidt telescope (where this story did NOT occur)
The old astronomer tells the tale... A certain mechanically-inclined graduate student was observing star fields at the Schmidt telescope, a telescope that used photographic plates. (This was a while ago; nobody makes these plates anymore.) This fascinating telescope design doesn't have any eyepiece; it is designed solely to take a photographic image of a wide field of the sky, often several degrees wide, using a series of corrector lenses and mirrors to insure that the stars are in sharp focus from one side of the plate to the other.
But when this student opened up the telescope to insert the photographic plate, he noticed that the plate holder was warped. Quickly, using his mechanical skills, he removed the plate holder and machined it flat.
Unfortunately, the plate holder was designed to be curved... the last step in the corrections making sure that the entire wide viewing field of the telescope was in focus on the plate.
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Stupid Astronomer Tricks #10: The dark side of the moon
Down to our last 10 days!
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... There is an effect called the Opposition Effect where solid bodies such as the Moon and Mars get significantly brighter when they are opposite the Sun. Part of the reason is the fact that the whole disk looks brighter when there are no shadows; the Full Moon is 40% brighter than the Moon even only one day before or after. (Check this out for yourself!)
A year before Pink Floyd's famous album "Dark Side of the Moon" was released, I heard them perform it live in Boston. They actually distributed a program sheet with lyrics... using the working title of the piece: "Eclipses"
But when the the light is virtually exactly behind you ("zero phase angle", or at least an angle much less than one degree) there is a second effect that kicks in, called coherent backscatter, which is due to quantum effects and the wave nature of light and... well, it's interesting, and potentially a powerful way of learning about the intrinsic nature of the material on the body's surface just from measuring how much brighter it gets as the phase angle goes to zero.
So we had the bright idea of observing the Moon on a night when we'd calculated that the phase angle would in fact drop exactly to zero. As the night progressed, and the Moon slowly moved into position exactly opposite the Earth from the Sun, the Moon did get brighter and brighter. But then, to our surprise, our detectors recorded it starting to fade, radically, almost as if it were disappearing!
So finally we went outside to see if there was a cloud or something between us and the Moon. Nope; the sky was crystal clear. And the Moon was going into the shadow of the Earth, beginning its lunar eclipse.
(If we'd thought about it, we'd have realized that this always happens to the Moon when you try to observe it at zero phase angle. Fortunately, Earth's shadow does not reach out to the asteroids, where this sort of orientation – while rare – can on occasion let us make observations at very low phase angle.)
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Stupid Astronomer Tricks #9: Life in Outer Spaces
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, and it actually seems to be working! – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... Telescope operators on Mauna Kea work for a number of nights on the telescope at 15,000 feet, sleeping during the day at a facility several thousand feet down the mountain. They then get time off to go home and visit family.
This plant seems well adapted to outer space conditions...
This systems allows them to stay acclimated to the thin air at the top of the mountain while they are at work, an issue that is obvious to anyone who spends time at altitude. However, thin air isn't the only problem you can encounter while living that much closer to the edge of outer space...
One telescope operator used to keep small plants by his desk in the telescope observing room. He was aware of the thin air and the low humidity that made growing these plants a challenge, but he cared for them carefully, and arranged for a friend to be sure they stayed well watered during the time when he was off the mountain. But in spate of that, the plants did not do well when he wasn't around.
Eventually, he found out what was happening. During the times he was off the mountain, the other telescope operators who kept the plant watered went one step further: they'd take it outside during the day and give it some sunlight. Unfiltered, high sunlight: with all the ultraviolet rays that normally don't make it to sea level. Instant high-altitude sunburn!
Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
Stupid Astronomer Tricks #8: Red letter day
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, which maybe is ambitious but we are adding a few new people every day, thanks! – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... There were several groups at different telescopes on different peaks in the area, all looking to record the occultation of a star by Neptune. The goal was to see how Neptune's atmosphere made the star dim as its light passed through first the upper, then the lower atmosphere.
Everything was working well. We'd had a guest with us earlier in the evening, but they couldn't stand the early hours and had gone back to the dorm to get some sleep. They took the white flashlight with them, but that was OK; we normally use a red flashlight to keep our eyes dark adapted. Our job was to guide the telescope on the star, even as Neptune went in and out of the field of view. Just for good measure, we started things running well before the event, to get a good baseline for the star's normal brightness.
Occultations are still the best way to measure the size of small objects like asteroids. This figure comes from the web site of the International Occultation Timing Association, IOTA, which tells you how to do it!
Then came the phone call! Two of the astronomers “down the road” at another telescope had seen something unusual, a dip in the star's brightness before it reached Neptune! Was it a real observation or just a glitch in their instrument? Well, that's why we had more than one telescope looking.
Those were the days of chart recorders... which meant that rather than having to download a series of computer files you could just take a look at the strip of paper to see if there was anything to be seen. One of us ran over with her flashlight to take a look at the strip chart recorder. Unfortunately...
"Bad news," she reported. "It looks like the strip chart recorder isn't recording anything. I can't see any line at all. Maybe something is malfunctioning? Maybe the pen ran out of ink?"
With the impending fear of a wasted evening, we hurried to see if we could fix the recorder before we missed the event. Turning on the white dome lights, a look at the strip chart told the tale... a tale of a perfectly recorded dip in the light exactly at the same time as the other telescope down the road!
The strip chart recorder used red ink. When it was illuminated by our red flashlight, the ink was impossible to see, because in that light everything is red...
(It was later determined... we had discovered a moon of Neptune.)
Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
Stupid Astronomer Tricks #7: Positive feedback
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... When I arrived, the lab was proud to boast that it had its own computer! It was, as I recall, a CDC 6400, with about as much power as your watch when it is asleep... but it took up a room the size of a classroom in the building. A special raised floor above all the cables. And, of course, a jacked up air conditioning system to take care of all the heat it put out.
Control Data Systems 6400 courtesy of Wikipedia. The photo shows only a part of the contraption, which filled an entire room.
But times change, technology changes, and even computers changed. Eventually it was replaced by a new-fangled "mini-computer" (probably a PDP-11 but I don't actually recall) which was merely the size of a refrigerator.
Given that office space was always tight, the logical suggestion was to cut the computer room in half, leave the computer and its associated peripherals in one side and turn the other side into a set of offices (for the women who were hired to count craters... shades of Henrietta Swann Leavitt!)
Of course, the amount of air conditioning needed to cool a computer was much more than that needed to cool a group of human beings, but the ducts to both sides of the room shared the same large cold air input. So the less than logical solution was to install heaters in the ducts over the office space.
Likewise, the thermostat controlling both rooms was left in the computer room, while the thermostat for the heaters was installed in the office space.
Sadly, the heaters seemed to do nothing. The office was freezing, no matter how high the thermostat was set. On the other hand, the computer room soon started overheating, leading the computer operators to keep turning down the thermostat... to no avail.
Finally, after a very expensive chain printer broke down due to overheating, the air conditioning gurus were called in.
The heater had been installed in the wrong set of ducts.
Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
Stupid Astronomer Tricks #6: Key observation
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, and we're well on our way – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... A researcher asked to sign out the department truck in order to run an errand. The keys were duly handed over: a key ring containing a metal tag with the vehicle number, and two keys.
The Carina nebula, visible from the southern hemisphere, is sometimes called "The Keyhole"
Moments later, the frustrated researcher came running back to the office, keys in hand, insisting to the Admin that they were the wrong keys. A quick trip to the parking lot with the researcher confirmed that the department had only truck in the lot and it had the same vehicle number as the one hanging from the key tag.
"But the key won't open the truck door," insisted the researcher. He demonstrated the problem.
The Admin looked at him carefully. "Did you try the other key?"
(As you might have guessed, some of these stories came to us from someone who used to be an administrative assistant at a certain unnamed major planetary sciences department somewhere in southern Arizona...)
Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
Stupid Astronomer Tricks #5: Opening a can of…
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members, and we're nearly 10% of the way there so far, thanks! – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... As we know, most astronomy runs on coffee. (Except, of course, for the excellent astronomy department at Brigham Young University, the LDS equivalent of the Vatican Observatory; Mormons don't drink coffee!)
So you can picture the scene... A senior professor, a theorist needless to say, came into the Admin Assistant’s office with a can opener in hand, and a puzzled look on his face. "We're out of coffee," he said.
Image from Wikimedia
Before the Admin could growl at him, he hastened to add, "I know, your job is not to make coffee for us; and I am willing to make a new pot. But I've never opened a can with anything other than an electric can opener!" He looked up, sheepishly, at this admission. "What do you do with this mechanical gizmo I found in the coffee room?"
Of course, the Admin took pity and made the coffee, all the while muttering about theorists...
A few years later, this story was passed on to the next Admin Assistant. It was received with some incredulity... until a week later, the very same professor used the very same excuse once again for not making a new pot of coffee!
Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
Stupid Astronomer Tricks #4: Keep Calm
We're running a membership drive this month – our goal is 150 new members – and as a part of it we're including this blatant clickbait series... Besides, it's a chance to tell some of the funny stories that come up during cloudy nights at the VATT!
The old astronomer tells the tale... As a guest in one of the University telescope domes, I watched as two observers set up for a planetary occultation observation. The senior astronomer worked quickly to get a strip chart recorder fixed (this was a while ago!) before the observations were to begin, while the grad student opened the dome and readied the telescope.
This is what a strip chart recorder looked like when I was a student, only about 47 years ago... (Wallace Observatory, MIT)
In those days, when you actually worked in the dome, you also had a finderscope with an eyepiece. But looking through the eyepiece, the student reported in a panicked voice, that nothing could be seen!
I looked up into the dome. The telescope was pointed at the wall.
I decided to let the student work it out. (They did.)
Don't let our site go blank! Why should you click on our donate button and help support our site? Your money supports the work of the Vatican Observatory, including our research, our telescope, our biennial summer schools, our educational outreach... and our mission to serve as a living sign of how science and religion are not enemies but work together without preconceptions in search of the truth. About a third of our budget comes from donations. And rather than just being at the mercy of one or two big donors or foundations, we want to show that our mission has a broader appeal. So we're asking for lots of people willing to send us $10 a month as a sign that they support our mission..and enjoy reading our stories. Can you join us?
ⓜ Pronouncing the Names of the Moons of Saturn…
...or, Pulling Teeth from Tethys (And Then I Wrote...)
Since this site began more than six years ago, every Thursday I have been publishing a reprint from my column "Across the Universe" in the British Catholic journal, The Tablet. I have finally gone through all of them (except for 2019's columns) and I've even re-published a few of the oldest ones that came out here before our readership had grown.
In order to let my backlog build up a bit, I am taking "Across the Universe" offline for 2020. Instead, I am republishing a selection of other articles that I have written an published in various places... often obscure.
NASA's images of eight of the nine moons of Saturn that I grew up learning (Titan was too big to fit in the picture). There's more than 80 of these moons known now!
Here's an offprint of a paper I first published in the AGU newspaper EOS back in 1982, on a topic that is still current. At the time, I was a postdoc at MIT working on computer models of the moons of Saturn, which were just coming up in conversation for the first time.
In fact, having had a classics background, I thought that everyone else was wrong, and went about trying to find someone to agree with me. That led me to Dr. Harald Reiche, a classics professor at MIT (there really existed such a person back then!) who showed me that the issue was much trickier than I had thought. And more interesting. (Dr. Reiche died in 1994; from his Wikipedia entry one can see that this sort of article was actually right up his alley!)
What really makes this paper fun, though, is how the editors of EOS handled it. Recognizing its barely-tongue-in-cheek nature, they decided that rather than just showing me the referee comments, they would actually publish them after my paper. And that's where the fun starts... between those who took it in good humor, and those who took it all too seriously!
Did this article from nearly 40 years ago make a difference? Well, on the one hand...
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