Do Re Mi

I guess I'll start at the beginning, since I hear it's a very good place to start. The trip was a celebration of my parents' 65th birthdays and 40th anniversary, all of which occured last year. My sister Gabrielle and her husband Chris are currently living in Africa, and Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo (of Heart of Darkness fame). Gabrielle, my other sister Dominique, and I, along with our spouses, gave our parents the present of a family trip to Africa. The Congo, however, is not a tourist friendly place, so we had to choose some other part of the continent to visit. After a fair bit of web surfing and guidebook reading over the past year, we settled on the "northern circuit" of Tanzania and the island of Zanzibar just off the coast as the best place for our trip.

There were eight of us going on this trip, starting from four different locations: my parents from Pennsylvania, Dominique & Ted from California, Gabrielle & Chris from Kinshasa, and Jaime & me from Arizona. That made the air routings a bit of a mess, but it all worked out in the end. Jaime and I flew from Phoenix to Chicago, where we met up with Ted, who had flown in from SFO. Dominique was already on the east coast for a conference, so she went with my parents to JFK. We six were all supposed to meet up in London, where our flights were scheduled to arrive only 5 minutes apart. In Chicago, I brought Jaime and Ted into the American Airlines Flagship Lounge, the special airline club with free food and booze for those of us who spent too much time on airplanes last year. Meanwhile, my parents and dominique were in the admirals club at JFK, which they got into for free since they all (and us too) had upgraded our seats to business class for the transatlantic flights. We connected via cell phone before departing, and it was fun to have a lounge-to-lounge conversation. The picture above left shows Ted and Jaime enjoying the Chicago flagship lounge.

We got into London around noon. The business class seats on American are quite comfortable, as is the whole business class experience (food, drinks, movies, all of it). Unfortunately, flights to heathrow are pretty short, only about 6 hours, which isn't enough time to properly enjoy it all, and get sleep too. So we all took a short nap at a hotel near the airport after arrival. Then we hopped on the tube and went downtown to meet up with our friends Renny & Bill, who moved to London from San Francisco about six months ago. They played tour guide for us as we walked around in the rain, looking for a good place for dinner (see the picture, above right). After rejecting an italian place, a middle eastern place, and a tavern (and there were no indian curry houses to be found in that part of town), we sent our advance scouts (Bill & Dominique) ahead without us to battle the rain and find a good restaurant which had space for eight. They succeeded in their quest, and we had a very nice meal at a Thai restaurant, lots of conversation, and then finally headed back to our hotel to catch some bed-ridden shut-eye before our next long flight on Monday.

Tomorrow, the journey continues...

Serengeti Splendor

I'm back home in Arizona, and almost back onto the right time zone. Jaime and I got home around 11pm on Monday night, having travelled for 43 hours to get home from Stone Town in Zanzibar, the last spot on our two week family safari to northern Tanzania and Zanzibar.

The trip was awesome. I shot 3250 pictures with my new SLR, and another 170 image pairs with my 3D camera rig. Now I've got to go through and process them all. Step one, downloading them onto my computer, is complete. Next I've got to back it all up to DVD, then start the big sort/tag where I throw out the less appealing ones, and keep the better ones. Then I can try optimizing some for printing, and others for posting on the blog. I haven't looked at them all yet, but here's one I found from a quick glance through the pictures I took on our first day in the Serengeti (which was something like our fifth day on safari, having previously visited Tarangire, Lake Manyara, and Ngorongoro crater, and Olduvai parks/camps). This was just before sunset on what was probably our most spectacular day, in terms of packs of big animals, including a pride of nine lions who had just finished a hunt (they caught and killed a cape buffalo), and a large herd of elephant grazing near a water hole. Pictures of those will get posted soon, I promise, once I figure out what sort of theme or order I want to put into the posts.

Oh, and I'll be posting a goodly number of 3D pics as well, in cross-eyed format, so start relaxing those eye muscles now.

Right, and a comment on the above picture. That's a Thomson Gazelle grazing under an acacia tree (one of the 100+ acacia varieties which grow in that part of the world).

Dinner in 3D

Those of you who used to read my old pic o' the day site know that I kind of got hooked on taking 3D stereoscopic pictures. At the time, I was using one camera and I would lean to my right, snap a picture, then lean to my left, snap another picture, and then I would combine them on the computer into a pair of images for cross-eyed viewing. Well, I've now gone one step better in that I bought a second identical camera and mounted them on a single bracket so that I can take both pictures at almost the same time (to within the accuracy of my fingers depressing both shutter buttons at the same time). This means I'll be able to take slow action shots in 3D! I can't wait to experiment more with the possibilities. The mounting bracket puts the cameras further apart then the human eyes are, which means that things are in super-stereo: the depth "feeling" is stronger than you would have in real life. But this is ideal for use with telephoto lenses, so that even with the higher magnification, you still get that 3D feeling. Try it on the image above. Sit back from the computer screen, cross your eyes and you will see two copies of each image. Relax your eyes until they overlap into a line of 3 images, and try to get your eyes to bring the central (overlapped) one into focus. It will appear in 3D. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, drink, and try again. I'm bringing the rig with me on my upcoming trip to Tanzania, so hopefully I'll get some awesome shots of lions and zebras and oryx, oh my!

So Sleepy

Most of the time we gemini queue observers are scheduled for four or five nights at a time, depending on the preferences of the individual observer. That works out to ~3 five night shifts or 4 four night shifts per semester. I always preferred the five night shifts. Now that I'm back here just for observing, I've got two observing blocks scheduled with a 10 day break in between to catch up on sleep, visit with friends, and toodle around La Serena and Santiago with Jaime. That's a good chunk of observing, and I'm at the tail end of night #5 right now, and I'm super tired. So if it were a normal run for me, I'd be done, but this time I'm up here for six nights, and I have to figure out some way to sleep today so that I can make it through tomorrow night. My second run, at the end of the trip, is only five nights, but then I have to go down that afternoon and fly home overnight to the U.S. That will probably be the most tired I've been getting onto the overnight flight, and I hope it leads to a serious quality sleep on the plane.

I'm too tired to even include a picture with this post...

New Dorm on Cerro Pachon

Woohoo, there's finally a new dorm on Cerro Pachon. We used to have to drive back and forth each day from the telescope on Pachon to the dorm on Cerro Tololo, half an hour away. And it's not an easy half hour drive. No, it was a stunningly beautiful and spectacularly scary half hour drive, after having stayed up and worked all night long, and trying to remain awake for that windy cliff-edged drive back to bed.

Now we have a three minute drop from the telescope to the new dorm. Much, much better and safer too. I slept there today, and while I'm still not able to get eight hours of continuous sleep up here, it was much quieter and more comfortable than the old Tololo dorms. So, Yey!

The architectural styling is kind of interesting too. The west face of the building has a bunch of windows on a long, wide hallway. It reminds me of an airport terminal. It also heats up something wicked in the afternoon (and it's late fall down here), but the rooms stay well insulated and cool despite the hallway temperature.

The windows cast interested shadows on the carpet, I was noticing during our daily 4pm coordination meeting. I want to take a picture of the shadows, but was busy with the meeting today. Tomorrow I'll bring the camera with me.

The other quirky thing about the building is the front entrance. It reminds me of the old space invader characters...

Stargazing

I'm back on my old stomping grounds, having just driven up to Cerro Pachon, site of the Gemini-South telescope. I'll be up here observing for six nights. It's a couple hours until sunset, and the sky is completely clear, and conditions seem quite stable, so it should be a good start to the observing run. I'm overlapping tonight with another astronomer to remind myself of how to operate things, and to learn what's changed since I was last up here in January.

The picture above is from my garden. It's a night jasmine bush which has the most wonderful scent, and flowers which make me think of stars. Or pinwheel galaxies.

Time to pack up my computer now and head to dinner, and then the summit. The first night can be hard to stay awake for, but hopefully my sleeping in today will allow me to stay at least somewhat alert for the whole time.

Surfin' round the world

It's been a while. I know you know that, because you've been telling me for weeks, months even. Who are you? You should know yourself. But just in case you are feeling a bit too singular to be singled out in a post by wee little me, yes, I am referring to the plural you, ustedes, not just the single you, you who is reading this right now (or perhaps due to the wonders of the world wide web, yous who are reading this right now), but to all of you (J, E, C, C, M, D, T, R, A, P, S, J, M, and all those other initials) who have asked me to get back at it, start posting again, and to keep it up a bit longer this time. So, here goes...

A year ago when I bought two surfboards, just after deciding to move to the desertlands of phoenix, people (maybe even you) asked why? Where was I going to surf in Arizona? Well, I answered then, I'll only be a six hour drive from the beaches of southern california. I won't have a job. I'll be able to go surfing whenever I want. So, six plus months after moving to said desert, have I been surfing yet? Yes, once, in san diego. But no, not on my board. It was a rental. So my board is sitting idly by in the house, yearning to be surfed upon, and my pool is sitting idly by in the backyard, yearning to make some waves, and combining the two seems like the perfect combination. I started by paddling around in circles (small, little circles). As my paddling form is still rather inefficient, I do get to paddle several times per hand in a forward direction before I need to throw on the hand brakes, turn, and head back the other way. As my efficiency improves, I expect I'll only get one or two paddles before I streak across the pool and outgrow the space. Then I start practicing my pop-ups, getting from prone to up-standing in one swift graceful motion. Finally, I graduate to advance maneuvers, such as the cut-back seen above. I'm ready to take on the real waves now. If only I could find an ocean...

In other news, I flew to La Serena yesterday, my old haunt, and I'm down here for most of May working for Gemini and doing a couple of observing runs. I'll do my best to get back into the frequent posting schedule I had when I lived here last.