Infrared Zoo

How I’m passing the time while observing: Infrared Zoo

Provided by Spitzer’s outreach site this contains infrared pictures of a wide variety of animals – it’s pretty awesome. My personal favorite (so far) is the swan.

Crazy Times

It’s that time of the year where there seems to be so much going on at once. Besides the end of the semester craziness with classes there’s lots of other fun milestones occurring. A whole spate of A exams kicked off today. The A exam is a sort of a PhD thesis proposal – you talk about the research you have done and plans for the next few years. You leave the room with a masters and as an official PhD candidate. We’ve also had one B exam (thesis defense) and have several more coming up. Plus, job offers have been coming in which means going out to celebrate.

I spent Wednesday afternoon doing outreach, which is always a great time. We had a bunch of extremely bright seventh grade girls visiting. I helped with activities to explain spectra to them. One of the most challenging parts, at least in my opinion, was making sure everyone was able to see the spectrum of some lamps we had. I’m personally so bad with the little diffraction viewers that trying to help other people is near impossible. Thankfully, our technology wizard was helping me and he was able to articulate how to view the lamps best. We had lots of other fun hands on activities – matching known spectra to mystery spectra and figuring out what objects bottles represented based on their composotion.

On a random note, Spitzer (the infrared space telescope) went offline for a few days a couple of weeks ago – it started just sending garbage down rather than useful information. It’s back up and working properly now. The problem? No one knows. The solution? Power cycling. It always works.