Today was the first day of the Society for Astronomical Sciences annual symposium. I arrived late last night after working all day. The late night drive up the winding mountain road was a bit scary since the fog was so thick that visibility was near zero, but I made it safely around 2:00 a.m.
The day began early with a workshop on Spectroscopy, one of my favorite areas of astronomy. Gary Cole gave an overview of the history of spectroscopy. Dale Mais followed with an entertaining session where we used small handheld diffraction gratings to observe spectral features in flames and various dangerous gasses. Then Olivier Thizy, who came here from France, gave a hands-on workshop on processing spectral data. It was an excellent session and despite being tired, I really enjoyed it.
At lunch we set up a couple of LHIRES III Spectrographs, and used them to observe the huge number of spectral lines in the Sun. The colors are simply amazing when you observe the Sun this way. The picture is of yours truly gazing in wild wonder at the bright green part of the Solar spectrum.
In the afternoon we had another workshop, on image processing by AIP4WIN author Richard Berry. It was interesting although I don't expect to be using that software very much.
After dinner we had another workshop on using SPIris software to process spectral images. I had planned to set up the 12" and run some spectra tonight, but it got too late and I'm exhausted, so I decided to wait until tomorrow.
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