The Arizona Rifleman

The Texas Stadium was recently demolished.

Like most major demolitions, there’s video of it.

Unlike most major demolitions, there’s panoramic video from inside the stadium. Way cool.

Astronomy always seems like something that’s incredibly awesome: you get to look into the depths of space, unravel the mysteries of the universe, and even the general public “gets it”…unlike, say, physics.

It’s not like that at all. Not at all.

Instead, you sit in a windowless, stuffy room all night, look at lolcats online, and occasionally go upstairs into the bloody freezing dome to make sure the telescope hasn’t exploded, fallen off it’s mounts, or generally gotten into trouble¹. Oh, did I mention the whole “staying up until 6am, two nights in a row, even though you have both classes and a day job” thing? Don’t forget the eating-Easy-Mac-because-the-kitchenette-sucks aspect as well.

Oh well, at least I get paid for it. Wait…I don’t get paid? Son of a…

1. Since it’s controlled by an ancient computer running Fedora Core 1, it occasionally gets into trouble. [↩]

Screw quantum mechanics. I should have become a rocket scientist; it’d be easier.

- Me, after a particularly mind-warping quantum mechanics class.

Busy with graduate school applications and science. Write-up on the recently mentioned new-shooter report is delayed somewhat.

When constructing a custom, non-sealed Geiger–Müller tube in a chamber in which you can vary the gas mix and pressure, pay attention to sharp edges of electrified parts outside of the tube itself: you ensured there was no sharp edges inside the tube, so avoid points where the electric field is stronger, thus avoiding inadvertent ionization of the gas mix.

When the same potential is applied to parts outside the tube, also in the chamber, sharp parts (e.g. a nut and the end of a piece of wire) can cause strong electric fields to be produced. This can cause a fun, purple glow¹ from one’s apparatus. This is bad.

Fortunately the high-voltage power supply is current-limited, and no damage took place.

In related news, electrical tape is extremely useful at insulating (amazingly enough) electrical devices and can stop the aforementioned problem.

1. The gas in the chamber was mostly argon. [↩]

A rather detailed news report about the…sport of anvil shooting can be found here.

Now, the question is…where can I get an anvil?

Last night, I found myself up at the observatory again. Surprisingly it was not a Dark and Stormy Night, but there were a few clouds that kept us from opening for some time.

Personally, I find it somewhat of a downer that these photons originated in a star mumbledy-mumbledy brazillion miles away, flew through the uncharted depths of space past wonders unknown by human minds, avoided vast interstellar dust clouds and other celestial obstructions, and traveled on a path destined to intersect the imaging system of a particular telescope on a particular mountain on the third planet of a rather ordinary, uninteresting star in the spiral arm of one of billions of galaxies…only to be intercepted at the very last possible moment by a wayward floating blob of water vapor a few hundred feet above the telescope.

The final result of their mumbledy-mumbledy brazillion mile tour of the universe was not, unfortunately, to be detected by advanced equipment, analyzed by up-and-coming scientists, and hopefully used to allow said scientists to better understand the universe. Rather, the result was that a particular blob of floating water vapor was heated by some infinitesimal fraction of a degree while the scientists below shake their fists and curse the clouds.

Truly, a rather pedestrian end to a photon that has traveled so far.

I was scheduled to observe at the 61″ Kuiper Telescope tonight.

Alas, mother nature decided this was not going to work, and gave us clouds and lightning. As such, we didn’t get to start observing at all and are now off the mountain.

In other news, the observatory is pretty nifty. I’ve never been at this one before.

The girlfriend of one of my fellow physics students works on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter project.

Tonight as a bunch of us physics folks were sitting around my apartment chatting (the girlfriend was up in the Phoenix area), my friend noticed her status message on Skype posed a practical question which I paraphrase as, “If a spacecraft 20km away from the LRO vents ~100g of hydrazine, what’s the probability of hydrazine impacting the LRO’s optical elements? You have 20 minutes.”

Taking this is as a challenge, we started calculating the answer. We knew very little details, so we made some assumptions: the hydrazine is in a spherically-symmetric expanding shell, both spacecraft are stationary relative to each other, and gravity is not a factor. In a few minutes we came up with a quick, dirty, back-of-the-envelope calculation that indicated that it would be very unlikely for any hydrazine to contact the optics and, if any did, it would be a very small amount (on the order of a few molecules).

My friend relayed our calculations and results to his girlfriend, who was surprised: she didn’t actually expect anyone to bother working stuff out. After a short while, she informed us that our calculations had been passed upstream to NASA for their consideration.

Very cool.

Of course, our calculations were almost certainly unrealistic. Even so, they provide a starting point.

Yes, physics students actually do this sort of thing in their spare time.

I’m sure I’m now on some sort of government watchlist.

Why? Just now, I have several windows open in Firefox, each with several tabs.

Among the various tabs open, one had the contact information for a local pizza parlor, another had the .223 page of Ammoman, a third had the Wikipedia article about plutonium, another about various radiation-emitting nuclear reactor accidents that have occurred, one showed the page for the D-Zero accelerator project from Fermilab, and another displayed the university’s physics department website.

I’m not entirely sure what terrible, nefarious plots the feds might think I’m up to, but they’re all true MUWHAHAHAHA! there is absolutely no truth involved in any of them. I just happened to be doing a bit of research (Fermilab, physics department), being distracted and reading about plutonium and reactor accidents (just for the heck of it), was looking for ammo deals, and was hungry. Really. I swear.