I'm back home after a bunch of fun astronomy activities. The SAS Conference was fantastic - I learned a lot and met some great people. It really fired me up to work a little harder on the science stuff. One of the best things was that my friend Olivier from France was there. He manufactured the LHIRES III Spectrograph, and was most helpful in finally getting it to first light. We had some great times and collected some good data too.
After SAS was RTMC, and fortunately the skies were clear and, unlike last year, the temperatures were reasonable. During the days I visited vendors, attended workshops, and generally had fun; during the nights I ran the spectrograph. The only down part was that my 12" continued to misbehave. The RA drive is seriously damaged, but it does continue to work if it's treated carefully and the scope is balanced. Unfortunately the slippage is enough to prevent any go-to operations, so all the pointing needed to be done manually. Nonetheless we managed to collect a bunch of spectra, both in high-res mode (2400 lines/mm grating) as well as low-res (300 lines/mm). My setup seemed to attract a lot of attention and there were usually between 3 and 10 people watching while we worked. This picture shows a few onlookers from Saturday night. My friend Alfredo was set up next to me and he took a lot of images despite the nearly full moon. One of our successes was to capture the Asteroid 4 Vesta - Alfredo snapped an image while I took a spectra.
After RTMC I met the family at relatives home in Southern California, and we spent an exhausting 3 days at Disneyland. The only astronomy that I practiced there was during the incredibly fun Space Mountain Roller Coaster Ride. Oh yeah, also Star Tours, and Buzz Lightyear Astroblasters....watch out for those little green men....
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