November 17th, 2002: OmG!!!!
So ToDaY I WeNt 2 ClAsS & My ProF wuz aLl bOrInG & StUpH. I H8 hIm SOOOOOOOOOOO mUcH!!!!! ThN I DiD SuM PrObLeM SeTs (LOL I LiKe 2 CaLl ThEm P-SeTz lol!) AnD I LuVeD ThAt B/CuZ MaTh & FzYX (LOL I KNoW HoW 2 SpEl It!) R FUN!!!!
November 5th, 2002: Oak Ridge Observatory
The 61-inch Wyeth telescope
A field trip (!) out to the Harvard observatory at Oak Ridge. Obviously it's not a visual observing telescope but they do spectroscopy and they have a badass radio antenna -- about 30 meters in diameter, I'd say.
Various widgets and doodads
The SETI scope
This is a telescope built by a graduate student for about four thousand dollars. As I recall, it's going to be used by SETI for surveying large swaths of the sky, though what it's looking for I forget exactly -- radio sources, I guess; there's a laser detector, but that's on the Wyeth telescope. The detector to this scope hasn't been attached yet so right now it's just some nice mirrors and a metal frame (that Alex claims has really crappy welding, but who knows about that.)
Our biggest planet
On the way out to the radio telescope there's the requisite scale model of the solar system. The sun is about a foot in radius and a hundred yards away or so. Pluto is another mile and a half in the opposite direction.
Um....
This is me trying to get a good picture of a really really large antenna in near-darkness with a not very powerful flash, no tripod, and a maximum exposure time of four seconds. Yeah. It's a really cool dish, although around a year ago the drivetrain broke and it was swinging around in the wind for a day or two. The drivetrain cost $35,000 to repair and the estimate is $100,000 to repair the dish, which has a bunch of dents where it was hitting the ground.
Computar powar!
This bad muthafucka processes the data from the radio telescope. Each card has several chips dedicated to running Fast Fourier Transforms.
Boxen
And then these guys just coordinate the data transfer between the processing thingamadoodies. Yow.
