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Fri. July 9, 1999
A dud asteroid
Yesterday's long night led me to a 1pm rising time today. I took a jaunt over to the Kitt Peak visitor's center (where observers get 10% off!) and looked over their goods. They have great posters, post cards, shirts, and doohickies that surely take visitor's money. My eye was caught by one particular item: a slice of a meteorite. The $30 chunk of alien material was part of a larger body that hit in Africa's Namibian desert. Gibeon, as it's called, had an incredible field of debris associated with it (which is why I can probably buy a chunk) and is composed mostly of nickel. The shiny delight would have to wait, however. I must ponder the purchase first...
My no nothing afternoon was enhanced (not!) by the fact that the network at least in the SARA dome was down and out. I love to be able to talk to people with email and upload my website updates. No chance of that today came until the late evening. They day slid into night and an amazing sunset graced the mountain with its splendor. Let a picture speak for itself:
With more anti-optical astronomy weather heading our way, everyone killed time listening to a bad Tucson radio station (only seemed to play duets and had lots of Phil Collins), putting together digital panoramas, and playing a game called XBoing on the Linux machines. After midnight there arose a chance to get some data. We woke our tired/bored bodies up and hopped to the various computer consoles. We had a chance to image some solar standard stars and a flux standard. We also set our sights on an asteroid (go figure!) named 334 Chicago. After we found the 13th magnitude rock we started an exposure through our spectroscope. After a half hour integration time we looked at what we got. Nothing. There was no spectrum of any sort in our image. Either we tracked the wrong object or we didn't get Chicago at all. It was a downer but we decided to try another camera as our aid in aiming the telescope so the asteroid stays in the slit. The other camera might help the cause tomorrow night. As for tonight, dawn soon approached as did the time for our sleep.
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