Size Matters (Of Telescopes, Of Course)

It's really amazing how sometimes old memories are completely off base because you've built them up in your head so much and other times they're spot on.  Luckily for me, this past weekend's trip to NRAO's Green Bank site was even better than I remembered my high school trip being.

It started on Thursday morning.  Tierra (my roommate) and I had decided to go into work early so we could get some work done before we left Charlottesville.  Bad idea.  I didn't realize until I got to the office that I couldn't do anything, anyway, because I didn't have the values I needed to put into my code.  So instead of working, I walked around to the building's various vending machines and gathered snacks for the drive ahead of me.  You can never have too many snacks.

We packed in one suitcase, because we've reached that stage in our roommateship. 

We left Charlottesville a little before 9:00 and got lost almost immediately.  There was some unfortunate miscommunication between the student driving and the one navigating. But we made it to Green Bank in one piece, and just about 30 seconds behind the other van!

After eating a much-needed lunch, we got to tour the Green Bank Telescope, the 100-meter, 16 million-pound monstrosity that has the honor of being the largest movable structure in the world. It took three different elevator rides to travel the 450 feet to the top of the telescope, and it was both beautiful and terrifying.  Looking down on the 2-ish-acre surface of the GBT, I found myself trying to contain an unbelievably strong urge to jump down to the dish and slide from one edge to the other.  Of course I didn't do that, but trust me. It was a hard urge to resist.

See that on the right? That's the GBT. And it's huge. 

Later that night, we went to dinner with the Green Bank students and they invited us to a bonfire at their house.  It had been so long since I had been around fire! It brought back memories of camping, home (where I had a wood-burning stove), and going to school every day smelling like wood smoke. It was a great time, only enhanced by the fact that the Green Bank students have their own private playground.  The fun was short-lived, though, because we had to be in the telescope control room at 7:30 the next morning.

Fast forward through the 6 hours of sleep I got and we get to the actual observation.  We had two and a half hours of observing time on the GBT, which may not sound like much, but it's a crapload of time to give to a bunch of college students!  We are talking about one of the most highly sensitive single-dish telescopes in the country.  We mapped the neutral hydrogen in some nearby galaxies for an hour or so, then we improved the location measurement of a pulsar (basically, a collapsed supernova that spins really quickly).  I know, super casual, right? No, it was really, really cool.

That's about it for our Green Bank trip.  We all made it back to Charlottesville safely, the exhausted new owners of lots of NRAO swag.

Really quickly, I just want to say something about my own research.  We got some new data about our galaxy! My mentor was leading a discussion on galaxy formation, and when someone heard what galaxy we're working with, he told my mentor about some archival optical data.  What does this mean? It means pretty pictures!

Isn't it gorgeous?? I've been working with this galaxy for five weeks, and I had no idea what it looked like.  Now that I know it's basically a supermodel among galaxies, I'm even more excited about my work than I was before!