Sooo….. hi. I got purchased my own website on a bit of an impulse. I figured I should probably put something onto it. So here is a first entry/attempt at a blog.

I’ve no idea how much I’ll use this or what I’ll post about. For now all I have to say is that I’m up a mountain. A mountain called Kitt Peak which host the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). I’m using the 1.3-m telescope at the MDM observatory which is a couple of miles from the main KPNO site. The Sun’s still up so there isn’t much to do yet. I’m looking for stars which vary on short periods, less than 30 minutes or so, in the Kepler field of view. The reason for this is that the Kepler spacecraft does not download to Earth all the pixels in the field of view. Instead targets must be preselected ahead of time. If we don’t know about interesting sources we can’t observe them. So I’m trying to find new interesting things.

Oh, last night the mirror cover got stuck shut on the 2.4-m telescope nearby so me so the observer on that telescope hit the stuck bit with a broom until it become unstuck. Who says science isn’t glamorous.