I’m sitting in what looks like a perfectly normal hotel room; bed, tv, shower and desk (with every astronomer’s essential needs – an internet connection – catered for). It’s only by opening the curtains that you might realise I’m somewhere special. Skiers are flying past in one direction, while in the other direction others are being pulled up the slopes on a chairlift. Down below the city of Granada stretches out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We’d worked our way through the throng earlier, looking incongruous pulling suitcases behind us among the multicoloured sportswear, on our way to use the IRAM millimeter radio telescope. We’ll be looking at merging galaxies selected from the Galaxy Zoo catalogues, and then at some of the nearest blue ellipticals.IRAM is a hard working telescope – being a radio telescope we can observe right round the clock – and we’ve been allocated a shift from midnight to 12.30pm starting tonight. The skies are – at the minute – clear and so the lunch we just shared with the day crew and other observers has become dinner, and I’m off to bed. Daniel and I will be blogging throughout the run, so please do keep us company – we’ll have plenty of time to answer questions once things start running smoothly.
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It is really a great way to spend the New Year, Chris. Good luck to you & the TEAM. I look forward to your reading your narration of the observing run. Happy New Year to all of you hard working scientists out there !
Pasa lo muy bien en Granada!!! (i.e. have fun in Granada!) I lived there five years ago and it was the happiest year of my life. If you get a chance, nip down and see the Alhambra and frequent a few tapas bars between the hours of midnight and 4am.
Looking forward to hearing about the blue ellipticals and mergers . . .
What a fun way to spend New Year’s, working hard. Try and have some fun also.
Grenada – Granada… one is an island in the Caribbean sea, but I’m assuming yuo are somewhere around here:
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=37.0661616&lon=-3.3921361&z=18&l=0&m=a&v=2
Oops – corrected, thanks Anders.
40 minutes till show time.
Wow, good luck, team. I look forward to the results
hmm, They must have been super busy. I see no “during” observation time blogging.