Palomar and Pasadena
After my short Bay Area vacation over the Fourth of July weekend it was time to shift the trip back into work mode - the rest of the trip would be devoted to a stay in Southern California. Largely this would be to devoted to a research group visit to Caltech (something of an annual tradition of mine), but the first item on the itinerary was a task I hadn't had a chance to do in a very long time: observe on-site with a major telescope.
After landing I caught the shuttle over to the rental car agency to pick up the car: in this case a mid-size SUV, which I specifically ordered to make sure we could comfortably accommodate all three of my graduate students, who were coming along on the trip as well. I made my way over towards the hotel at which they'd already been staying at for a couple nights (to beat jet lag before our planned observing). I collected them at a coffee shop nearby, and we made our way across the LA freeways and eventually up to the top of Mount Palomar, which was to be the base of operations for our run.
We arrived at around 6pm, and got set up for observing - but not with any of the telescopes on the mountain; instead we would actually be remotely controlling a telescope a few hundred miles away at Lick, since coincidentally the two California PI's that we collaborate with to obtain observing time had runs at the same time. After our microwave dinners (Palomar recently dismissed all of its on-site cooking staff to save money) we set up in the "monastery" (really a dormitory) dining room with our laptops, and observed for most of the night. (An inexperienced undergraduate from UCLA finished the last two hours - I was hoping my students would do it all, but given the availability of help they took the option to stop a bit early.)
The next day was our actual on-site run, but before getting set up we took a couple hours to tour the mountain. While the star of Palomar Mountain - and the telescope we were there to use - is the famous 200-inch (for decades the world's largest telescope), in many ways the more important telescopes for our project right now are the smaller 60-inch and 48-inch telescopes that operate robotically and conduct the major international research project that has driven most of my research since 2018 (and most of my students' research, as well). One of the mountain staff was kind enough to show us around and let us inside the domes so that we could see each telescope - which wasn't new to me, but was entirely new to my students, and to some extent this was even the main reason for the trip (I wanted them to be able to witness in person the instruments which are driving their thesis work).
After that was over it was time for the real work, and we went over to the 200-inch control room and set up for operations there. We took the calibrations, returned to the dorm for microwave dinner #2, and then came back to the telescope to begin the night. The start of data-taking was delayed (one of the staff had forgotten to plug in an element of the system...) but we got going eventually and things proceeded smoothly throughout the night. I and my most junior student did most of the Palomar 200-inch observing while my other two students mostly handled the simultaneous remote Lick observing.
The next day we woke up around 11am and departed the mountain by noon, and made our way to Pasadena. I dropped the students off at their hotel, then continued onto Burbank Airport where I returned the rental car, and then took an Uber back to Pasadena to meet up with my friend who'd be hosting me for the next week.
My plan for the stay was pretty similar to last year: I'd be crashing in the spare room / office of one of my old friends from my own grad student days. Since then he'd moved to Pasadena to take up a staff position at NASA-JPL, and was liveing with his partner (and their cat) in an apartment within walking distance of Caltech campus. Last year I stayed with them for a few days before they departed for their week-long-volunteer shift at atheist summer camp and left the apartment to me (while I looked after the cat, who proceeded to take out his frustration at being left bored and alone on me). This year they weren't doing athiest summer camp (there was "drama" in the organization, apparently) and thus were around the whole time... which was mostly good, although I did worry initially that my stay was bound to be somewhat more imposing this time as a result.
Wednesday was to be our first day visiting the Caltech astronomy department, but early on I had to make an executive decision: right in the middle of the day, and simultaneous with a meeting I and my group had been invited to attend, was a Very Important soccer game: England vs. Netherlands in the semifinal of the Euro 2024 tournament. My students obviously wanted to watch and I did too, and so after some ponderings I decided to skip the meeting and once we'd checked in on campus, we grabbed an uber to the nearest pub, watched the game, and then immediately scooted back when it was over. It was the right decision: England fell behind early, tied in the last minute, and then scored the winner in the waning minutes of extra time, so it was lots of fun to watch. The lady sat next to us was British (but living in SoCal for the last 20 years) and my students got to talk with her.
After that bit of cultural hookey, the visit Thursday was somewhat more serious and Friday was as well. At the end of the day I was able to again give my students a memorable experience: I ran into a former postdoc who was now Caltech's unofficial outreach coordinator, and he said he had some spare tickets to a public lecture later that evening by Kip Thorne, a super-famous Caltech physicist who (among other things) wrote the plot of Interstellar and also won a Nobel Prize. I managed to score tickets for me, my hosts, and both my students (the third student flew back that evening to attend a UK meeting), and we all went to the lecture later that night. The lecture was interesting, if a bit wacky (lots about wormholes and warps in spacetime, the pop-science stuff for which Thorne is most famous in the public sphere), and with some time to spare after we then proceeded to a nearby bar for a drink, which was fun as well since I was able to introduce my students to my friend and vice versa.
On Saturday I didn't initially have much in the way of plans - on Friday morning I'd received a very annoying (and very overdue) referee report back on my latest paper and I was desparate to get my reply (rebuttal, really) out as soon as possible, so I spent much of the morning/afternoon working on that. However, the previous day I'd pinged local furries Dex and Al a message asking if they were free that weekend - and it turned out that not only were they free for Saturday night but Sabot was also in town from New Mexico, and so we quickly made plans to meet at an upscale Pasadena BBQ joint for dinner followed by a visit to the nearby whiskey bar, which was a lot of fun.
On Sunday I had plans of a different sort - since England had won the semi-final earlier in the week they'd be playing in the final, and said final would be taking place at noon on Sunday. My students obviously definitely wanted to catch this as well, so we made plans to go to Pasadena's British pub (for an appropriate atmosphere). I planned to go an hour early at 11am to reserve a table, in case it got busy. However, it turned out that almost every British person and/or soccer fan in the area had the same idea and there was a queue out the door even an hour before the match. So I scrapped that plan and headed to another nearby bar instead, which was busy enough to offer a fun experience but not packed enough to have a line out the door, although we did have to stand the whole time. This game was quite a bit of fun as well (the hundred or so people in the bar were overwhelmingly supporting England and quite a few among those we talked to had English connections), but unfortunately with a few minutes left Spain scored the go-ahead goal and ultimately the result ended in a loss. Oh well. (We went for lunch and for a drink afterwards anyway.)
This week had few equivalently memorable events, but overall was still good. My friend, his partner and I had planned to go to a nearby famous Chinese dumpling restaurant on Tuesday... but his partner ended up getting ill and couldn't come (some sort of food poisoning, we suspected). As we were on the way to the restaurant my friend started feeling ill as well and wasn't sure he could keep food down, so it ended up being just me eating at the restaurant with my friend there for company only (slightly awkward, but I used to go to that place alone on a regular basis when I lived in the area). On Wednesday night my students and I, and a student and a project software engineer, went out for divey Mexican and a divey bar (which I figured was an appropriate sendoff).
And then on Thursday it was time to fly home!
All in all it was a good visit. Not everything was perfect: the two most important people in the department (including Prof K) were not there, and neither was the British postdoc who showed my students around the area last time. But enough people were there to justify the stay, and I was able to set up a number of important meetings to help my students network - plus the observing run, the public lecture, and football viewing, so I definitely felt like I was being a very good PhD advisor (and I also just had a lot of time to talk to my students in an informal context in general). Hopefully this will remain an annual thing for quite a while.
After landing I caught the shuttle over to the rental car agency to pick up the car: in this case a mid-size SUV, which I specifically ordered to make sure we could comfortably accommodate all three of my graduate students, who were coming along on the trip as well. I made my way over towards the hotel at which they'd already been staying at for a couple nights (to beat jet lag before our planned observing). I collected them at a coffee shop nearby, and we made our way across the LA freeways and eventually up to the top of Mount Palomar, which was to be the base of operations for our run.
We arrived at around 6pm, and got set up for observing - but not with any of the telescopes on the mountain; instead we would actually be remotely controlling a telescope a few hundred miles away at Lick, since coincidentally the two California PI's that we collaborate with to obtain observing time had runs at the same time. After our microwave dinners (Palomar recently dismissed all of its on-site cooking staff to save money) we set up in the "monastery" (really a dormitory) dining room with our laptops, and observed for most of the night. (An inexperienced undergraduate from UCLA finished the last two hours - I was hoping my students would do it all, but given the availability of help they took the option to stop a bit early.)
The next day was our actual on-site run, but before getting set up we took a couple hours to tour the mountain. While the star of Palomar Mountain - and the telescope we were there to use - is the famous 200-inch (for decades the world's largest telescope), in many ways the more important telescopes for our project right now are the smaller 60-inch and 48-inch telescopes that operate robotically and conduct the major international research project that has driven most of my research since 2018 (and most of my students' research, as well). One of the mountain staff was kind enough to show us around and let us inside the domes so that we could see each telescope - which wasn't new to me, but was entirely new to my students, and to some extent this was even the main reason for the trip (I wanted them to be able to witness in person the instruments which are driving their thesis work).
After that was over it was time for the real work, and we went over to the 200-inch control room and set up for operations there. We took the calibrations, returned to the dorm for microwave dinner #2, and then came back to the telescope to begin the night. The start of data-taking was delayed (one of the staff had forgotten to plug in an element of the system...) but we got going eventually and things proceeded smoothly throughout the night. I and my most junior student did most of the Palomar 200-inch observing while my other two students mostly handled the simultaneous remote Lick observing.
The next day we woke up around 11am and departed the mountain by noon, and made our way to Pasadena. I dropped the students off at their hotel, then continued onto Burbank Airport where I returned the rental car, and then took an Uber back to Pasadena to meet up with my friend who'd be hosting me for the next week.
My plan for the stay was pretty similar to last year: I'd be crashing in the spare room / office of one of my old friends from my own grad student days. Since then he'd moved to Pasadena to take up a staff position at NASA-JPL, and was liveing with his partner (and their cat) in an apartment within walking distance of Caltech campus. Last year I stayed with them for a few days before they departed for their week-long-volunteer shift at atheist summer camp and left the apartment to me (while I looked after the cat, who proceeded to take out his frustration at being left bored and alone on me). This year they weren't doing athiest summer camp (there was "drama" in the organization, apparently) and thus were around the whole time... which was mostly good, although I did worry initially that my stay was bound to be somewhat more imposing this time as a result.
Wednesday was to be our first day visiting the Caltech astronomy department, but early on I had to make an executive decision: right in the middle of the day, and simultaneous with a meeting I and my group had been invited to attend, was a Very Important soccer game: England vs. Netherlands in the semifinal of the Euro 2024 tournament. My students obviously wanted to watch and I did too, and so after some ponderings I decided to skip the meeting and once we'd checked in on campus, we grabbed an uber to the nearest pub, watched the game, and then immediately scooted back when it was over. It was the right decision: England fell behind early, tied in the last minute, and then scored the winner in the waning minutes of extra time, so it was lots of fun to watch. The lady sat next to us was British (but living in SoCal for the last 20 years) and my students got to talk with her.
After that bit of cultural hookey, the visit Thursday was somewhat more serious and Friday was as well. At the end of the day I was able to again give my students a memorable experience: I ran into a former postdoc who was now Caltech's unofficial outreach coordinator, and he said he had some spare tickets to a public lecture later that evening by Kip Thorne, a super-famous Caltech physicist who (among other things) wrote the plot of Interstellar and also won a Nobel Prize. I managed to score tickets for me, my hosts, and both my students (the third student flew back that evening to attend a UK meeting), and we all went to the lecture later that night. The lecture was interesting, if a bit wacky (lots about wormholes and warps in spacetime, the pop-science stuff for which Thorne is most famous in the public sphere), and with some time to spare after we then proceeded to a nearby bar for a drink, which was fun as well since I was able to introduce my students to my friend and vice versa.
On Saturday I didn't initially have much in the way of plans - on Friday morning I'd received a very annoying (and very overdue) referee report back on my latest paper and I was desparate to get my reply (rebuttal, really) out as soon as possible, so I spent much of the morning/afternoon working on that. However, the previous day I'd pinged local furries Dex and Al a message asking if they were free that weekend - and it turned out that not only were they free for Saturday night but Sabot was also in town from New Mexico, and so we quickly made plans to meet at an upscale Pasadena BBQ joint for dinner followed by a visit to the nearby whiskey bar, which was a lot of fun.
On Sunday I had plans of a different sort - since England had won the semi-final earlier in the week they'd be playing in the final, and said final would be taking place at noon on Sunday. My students obviously definitely wanted to catch this as well, so we made plans to go to Pasadena's British pub (for an appropriate atmosphere). I planned to go an hour early at 11am to reserve a table, in case it got busy. However, it turned out that almost every British person and/or soccer fan in the area had the same idea and there was a queue out the door even an hour before the match. So I scrapped that plan and headed to another nearby bar instead, which was busy enough to offer a fun experience but not packed enough to have a line out the door, although we did have to stand the whole time. This game was quite a bit of fun as well (the hundred or so people in the bar were overwhelmingly supporting England and quite a few among those we talked to had English connections), but unfortunately with a few minutes left Spain scored the go-ahead goal and ultimately the result ended in a loss. Oh well. (We went for lunch and for a drink afterwards anyway.)
This week had few equivalently memorable events, but overall was still good. My friend, his partner and I had planned to go to a nearby famous Chinese dumpling restaurant on Tuesday... but his partner ended up getting ill and couldn't come (some sort of food poisoning, we suspected). As we were on the way to the restaurant my friend started feeling ill as well and wasn't sure he could keep food down, so it ended up being just me eating at the restaurant with my friend there for company only (slightly awkward, but I used to go to that place alone on a regular basis when I lived in the area). On Wednesday night my students and I, and a student and a project software engineer, went out for divey Mexican and a divey bar (which I figured was an appropriate sendoff).
And then on Thursday it was time to fly home!
All in all it was a good visit. Not everything was perfect: the two most important people in the department (including Prof K) were not there, and neither was the British postdoc who showed my students around the area last time. But enough people were there to justify the stay, and I was able to set up a number of important meetings to help my students network - plus the observing run, the public lecture, and football viewing, so I definitely felt like I was being a very good PhD advisor (and I also just had a lot of time to talk to my students in an informal context in general). Hopefully this will remain an annual thing for quite a while.