018.

Saturday, Michelle and I bought 14 donuts, and then took the metro to downtown LA, which was surprisingly dead on a Saturday. Checked out the exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art and got heckled by every single male that we happened to walk by. Ate a delicious dinner at the neighbors, and then went back to Club BANG in Hollywood that night, where the heckling ensued. Today I got my hair colored, and naturally it's the complete opposite of what I asked for. Came home and was lazy for the rest of the day. Back to work tomorrow.

017.

Today sucked. A lot.

016.

K-band's being difficult. OH lines don't match up... try again tomorrow. H2 shouldn't be so far to the right...

Division 32 welcome reception today. JPL is past, present, and future. And overwhelming. And wonderful.

015.

Mirror Images

Space shuttle Atlantis (foreground) sits on Launch Pad A and Endeavour on Launch Pad B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the left of each shuttle are the open rotating service structures with the payload changeout rooms revealed. The rotating service structures provide protection for weather and access to the shuttle.

For the first time since July 2001, two shuttles are on the launch pads at the same time. Endeavour will stand by at pad B in the unlikely event that a rescue mission is necessary during Atlantis' upcoming STS-125 mission to repair NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The missions is slated to launch Oct. 10.

After Endeavour is cleared from its duty as a rescue spacecraft, it will be moved to Launch Pad 39A for its STS-126 mission to the International Space Station. That flight is targeted for launch Nov. 12.

014.

EXTRACTED STAR & NEBULAR SPECTRA TODAY.

WURRRRRRRRRRRRRRD.

013.

I got sent home early today so that I don't infect/annoy people with my coughing. We're going to try reducing and calibrating with REDSPEC in IDL instead of the useless IRAF procedures I've been working on the past couple of weeks.

I just want it to be the weekend so that I can dance.

012.

I am a sickly baby.

&

Pictures from last weekend:

me & Michelle at Club BANG

011.

new Mars rover landing vehicle

rover xing

010.

Ben Oppenheimer gave a talk during the Earth and Space Science Colloquium this morning. He's brilliant. Must be in his mid thirties, but was a co-founder of the first brown dwarf years ago, and has contributed heavily to the detection of exosolar planets. Not to mention he's funny as hell. He works at the Rose Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, so after he built his latest coronagraph (for which they tried to get Corona to sponsor), he wheeled it around the museum after hours and took pictures of it with the dinosaur skeletons and other exhibits. I love scientists with a sense of humor.

&

Some pictures from Hollywood this past weekend:

me & Michelle

Spiderman

Yeah man!

009.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Heart and Soul Nebulas.

008.

Hollywood was a bust last night, so we're trying again tonight. Club Bang baby!

007.

Teen commits suicide after 'end of world' reports.

006.

Today's NASA Image of the Day: NASA Remembers

"The world changed today. What I say or do is very minor compared to the significance of what happened to our country today when it was attacked." So said Expedition 3 Commander Frank L. Culbertson, upon learning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

This image is one of a series taken that day of metropolitan New York City by the International Space Station's Expedition 3 crew that shows a plume of smoke rising from the Manhattan skyline.

Upon further reflection, Commander Culbertson said, "It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are."

005.

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day: Mountain Top Meteors (Perseids)

004.

I'm doing a terrible job at keeping up with Michelle. I'd like to post in this everyday, but you know how things go.


Some pictures:

my building.

my office.

badge!

rover testing.

003.

http://www.xkcd.com/474/

&

First beam in the LHC - accelerating science

Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN¹ was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. >>

002.

http://xkcd.com/473/

001.

Day 2.

Yesterday was day 1. Arrived at JPL around 8:00 and sat in a conference room with all the other interns until it was time to meet my mentor. One by one they all went off into the world of rocket science while I sat and waited my turn, making small talk about building locations, M. G. Lord, and the LHC.

I finally met my mentor around 9:00, and he is the CUTEST little old Indian man. And he's brilliant. We spent a few hours going over practically everything related to the research that we will be doing on preplanetary nebulae, and I was able to follow relatively easily. Got lunch with Kathryn and then spent the afternoon reading papers until my account was set up. Left at 4:00.

This morning I downloaded star field images from the 2MASS database of our IRAS sources until 9:00 and then trekked to the badging office to get my NASA badge. It's purple. Got fingerprinted and such. Then came back and compared my mentor's HST images to the 2MASS images, and found some inconsistencies in the data, so we spent a couple of hours sorting that out and playing cat and mouse identifying sources with their spectra. Information overload, I thought my head was going to expload. Satisfying, though. Left at 5:00.

p.s. I copied Michelle by making this.