It's another 11 hours till sunrise, so forgive me if this becomes rambling. I've got time to kill.
It's our third night, and I'm afraid I'm suffering a bit. I'm a bit bunged up, which is exacerbated by the altitude. On the first night when we came off the summit, I went deaf in my left ear... basically it didn't re-pressurise. This is not a nice experience - like being underwater. There was some debate on whether I should go up at all the next night, lest my eardrum explode. We risked it, and I was ok, but felt pretty rotten. Still got the same problem, so I'm loading up on decongestants to try to unblock the tubes connecting that ear to my sinuses. Hopefully it will clear up in a day or two. Had a nosebleed tonight too... ho hum.
Observing is going pretty good - nice seeing for most of the night, and the weather hasn't turned bad yet as we thought it might (there were some pretty high clouds at sunset tonight though - a bad sign). The main problems have been technological - software and hardware related to the telescope. We almost had a slight disaster last night when we pointed too close to the moon (again, we blame this on software)... spotted it in time though. That was 30mins observing down the pan.
We have M&Ms & pretzels, and the music playing. It's quite chilled out in the control room when nothing's going wrong. Oh yeah, we saw the plume from Kilauea the other morning driving down... here is a pic
Ok, going to try to do some work now... might add some edits later on.
It's our third night, and I'm afraid I'm suffering a bit. I'm a bit bunged up, which is exacerbated by the altitude. On the first night when we came off the summit, I went deaf in my left ear... basically it didn't re-pressurise. This is not a nice experience - like being underwater. There was some debate on whether I should go up at all the next night, lest my eardrum explode. We risked it, and I was ok, but felt pretty rotten. Still got the same problem, so I'm loading up on decongestants to try to unblock the tubes connecting that ear to my sinuses. Hopefully it will clear up in a day or two. Had a nosebleed tonight too... ho hum.
Observing is going pretty good - nice seeing for most of the night, and the weather hasn't turned bad yet as we thought it might (there were some pretty high clouds at sunset tonight though - a bad sign). The main problems have been technological - software and hardware related to the telescope. We almost had a slight disaster last night when we pointed too close to the moon (again, we blame this on software)... spotted it in time though. That was 30mins observing down the pan.
We have M&Ms & pretzels, and the music playing. It's quite chilled out in the control room when nothing's going wrong. Oh yeah, we saw the plume from Kilauea the other morning driving down... here is a pic
Ok, going to try to do some work now... might add some edits later on.
