Resonant Constellation

250 years ago, Arthur Guinness signed a 9000 year lease for his St. James Gate brewery. While it may not be the best beer out there, you can always count on a Guinness to be satisfying. Let’s all raise a glass!

Here’s two 3-color-images from the 61″, the first of Messier 74, and the second of NGC 1055. I hope you find them as awesome as I do (I like the first better than the second-the colors seem to have come out nicer).

Tonight started with some more lightning and rain which moved off some time before midnight. We didn’t get any data, but we got some pretty pictures. Here’s a few:

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Since we’re not collecting data until the storm moves off, I decided to get more lightning photos from the catwalk of the 61″ dome. Some are blurry because it is difficult to focus a camera when your fingers are freezing off.

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For the second time in a row, we’ve been clouded/lightning’d out of our observing run. Our next run is a two night deal on Friday and Saturday. The weather still doesn’t look good for then. If we manage to loose those transits too, we will have lost a full third of our nights to weather. This is not happy.

Since we got hurricaned out of our observing tonight, we decided to head down the mountain. Halfway down, we stopped at a pullout and I got out my camera to do some time exposures of the city with lightning in the background. Here’s some of the best ones:

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Recently several papers came out that indicate that magnetic monopoles (or magnetic monopole analogues) actually exist. If you don’t know what these are, look them up on wikipedia, and you’ll see that it’s a pretty exciting result. IF these results are true (note the big if), physics has some serious changing to do. For example:

no longer holds. WOAH! A change to Maxwell’s equations! HERESY!

Here’s some links to articles and papers about it:
Nature News
Science NOW
Observation of Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice, Kadowaki et al. 2009
Magnetic Charge Transport, Bramwell et al. 2009

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The Irish/Celtic/Folk band 2Duos is coming through town this weekend, and I couldn’t be more excited. First off, I’ve had my tickets since the beginning of the summer (or thereabouts), so I’ve been awaiting this concert quite a while. I’ve been big fan of Aaron Jones, the Bouzouki/Guitar player and lead singer of this group since I first heard him in one of my other favorite bands, Old Blind Dogs, around 2003/04 when they came through Albuquerque on tour. Since then, his playing style has vastly influenced my own and I’d go so far as to call him a musical hero of mine.

All of which is to say that I was extremely excited to learn that I could actually get a private lesson with Aaron on guitar when he came through town. I instantly jumped at the idea, and I found myself at the house of a gracious Tucson host to the musicians of 2Duos on Thursday. We began with an hour long lesson in which I learned more about trad. music on guitar than I have in the last eight months combined. Recently, I feel I’ve been on a kind of plateau and that my playing proficiency hasn’t really gone anywhere, but this lesson certainly got me past that blockage. I’m still trying to work out where to go with all of the options that have opened up for me.

After this excellent lesson, I shared a beer with Aaron, and we discussed a wide variety of topics. At one point he related a story in which he was awed by being able to watch some of his favorite musicians from different bands play together at a festival, and it was at this point when I realized; here I am, sharing a beer and trading stories with one of my musical heroes! It is not something I will soon forget.

Afterwards, everybody (people there for lessons and the band) got together for a little session. It was a truly great night. Now I look forward to seeing the show tomorrow night.

Well, summer is over now and school has begun. This means that I’m going to be quite a bit more busy with work, but at least I’ll have a normal sleep schedule. I’m really looking forward to this semester, as I’m taking an advanced laboratory course in which I get to design my own project. I’ve decided to grind my own telescope mirror and do several different optical tests on it, which is something I’ve always been interested in. Aside from this, I’ll get a nice telescope out of the deal, so it’ll be rather fun.

I also have some side projects going this semester, such as growing various plants and herbs. Several of us Physics/Astronomy majors decided it would be interesting to see if we could grow living things, so we got pots, soil, and seeds for various things. I’m growing basil, oregano, and tomatoes so that I can make my tomato sauce out of homegrown ingredients. Pete chose to grow corn, pumpkins, and watermelon, which should be interesting. Several of us are also considering trying our hands at homebrewing beer. The equipment is rather expensive, so we’ve decided to split it four ways. Still, the kit is supposed to produce about 5 gallons of beer, so we’ll end up with an excess.

In other news, I’ve finally figured out how to use my camera to take nice long exposure astrophotos. Although I don’t have a tracker, some of these photos turned out pretty well. I’ll post some in my next entry.