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Thu. July 8, 1999
16 Psyche
Beginning my day with a knock on my door from James could've been worse. I'm kinda' glad he came by to get the car keys because I neglected to set my alarm for 11am, just about the time he woke me. I was determined to make today a productive day. I inhaled my breakfast (which is really lunch, kinda') and headed to the pool/laundry room. I emptied my duffle bag into the cleaning maching and left it to do its magic. Since my impact foot injury I've refrained from hiking up mountains or running marathons. I am pleased to report that my foot felt up to wandering around the south side of Kitt Peak today. With my [usually] trusty digital camera in hand I wandered around the catch basin for most of Kitt Peak's water supply and around the bend in the road to the solar observatory. That observatory is truly impressive. The scope extends 500' below into the mountain. I clammered around a few small hills to get a great view of the solar beast. On my way back down, however, I fumbled to protect the injured foot and ended up scraping up the other one. I guess injuries just happen in local waves. Hurt a foot and save it by hurting another.
The rest of my afternoon consisted of a lump of work on my website and downloading images from my camera. With good ol' Harry Connick on the CD player, I chugged away to catch up with the days that have passed since my last website entry. Dinner was taken in by us all and we all returned to the dome to take the regular biases, darks, flats, and lamps. I checked my email (I do it often) and was pleasently surprised by a "talk" request from Sarah. I figured out how to reply and we were off and chatting. As we caught up with one another live, there was an extremely energetic storm surround Kitt Peak and our dome. The massive system swirled overhead and nearly constant bursts of lightning shot through the sky, silhouetting observatory domes on the briefly lit cloud deck. Two power farts shut down the computers not hooked to a protection generator while I talked with Sarah. One final power outage rendered our control dark with only the whir of three computers keeping us all company. This happened in the middle of my chat with Sarah but I noticed that only the monitor on my computer went off. Amidst a bit of ridicule from the guys and Dr. Leake, I continued to type to her in a dark room on a dark monitor. I just kept telling her what was going on and that I couldn't see a word she would type. It was kind of interesting to be able to communicate with her our situation even though most everything around us was inoperative.
Without any control over the situation, we all decided to leave the darkened dome to get night lunch. When we got to the cafeteria it seemed to us that the SARA dome was the only place on the mountain without power. Other domes and the cafeteria had power to them. When we finished we returned to the dome. With a feeling of a dark campground, I turned on Dr. Leake's laptop computer to provide some kind of light. As the screen cast a dull glow throughout the control room, Jason G. played the guitar a bit. Dr. Leake sang with Jason on the guitar and they started to go through the SARA song. Miraculously the power returned and the lights and computers were again up and good to go.
Amidst the jumble to make sure the dome's equipment wasn't too shocked by the power outage, someone checked the weather. There were clear friggin' skies! We scrambled into action and took images and spectrum of two comparison stars. We then targeted a relatively bright, large, and well-studied asteroid, 16 Psyche. This 10th magnitude potato-shaped rock was our first successful object. We got an image of it and took a 30 minute exposure through the slit of our spectrometer. Although a mere spot on the screen of our screen, I was amazed to think that it was a relatively small body millions of miles away. This stuff could get seriously addictive.
After all the excitement, we shut down for the night as twilight greeted the morning sky. Going to bed at 5am is a strange kind of groove to get into.
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