• Mill for Science

    Today was Earth Day but also the day of many Marches for Science across the planet. We did our part here in Amsterdam (see also marchforscience.nl): a group of us from the astronomy department here at University of Amsterdam set up a booth and hung out all day answering questions, showing the solar telescopes we couldn’t use because it was too cloudy (typical…) and various movies and visuals about astrophysics on a monitor to lure people in. But unlike many other events, there was no real march, it was all located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam, with a bunch of people milling around between tents and stages, so that’s why…

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  • Aftermath

    Sorry for the delay in posting, I was knocked out for a few days with something but catching up now. So EHT did end up triggering the final night on 11 April! Things went really well, and one of the things I really wanted to see happen, happened! My main role in all this was to help organize and coordinate the “multiwavelength” observations, meaning trying to get telescopes in space and on the ground looking in other wavelengths (primarily X-ray and infared (IR) which are the only other bands besides radio that are visible through all the muck between us and the center of the Galaxy). We had a big…

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  • Drumroll please….

    Ok I was too tired last night (or rather, early this morning) to complete my report from Amsterdam/EHT “Pajama Central Command” outpost, sorry to leave the ~10 people reading this in suspense! It turned out to be quite a harrowing situation. Shep (the PI) referred to it as a more typical “angst-ridden” decision, because the earlier nights had been pretty clear what to do. By the time we reconvened at 1:00am EU time, the good news was that the weather at LMT had begun to stabilize, and SMT was still a bit marginal but good to go. But then there was an O-ring problem on one of the helium dewars…

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  • Amsterdam/EHT Pajama Central Command Outpost

    It’s a tense night here at the Amsterdam/EHT “Pajama Central Command” outpost! All sites have remarkably good weather except SMT (marginal but not terrible) and LMT (worse than marginal but potentially variable). The team decided to do a provisional “GO”, but are reconvening at 1:00am Europe time to see what things look like then. Given the Chandra and NuSTAR coverage I am really hoping the LMT weather improves. It’s a bit like watching a toaster, I keep checking the site opacity monitor and it’s very variable, but higher than the sustained 0.5 we want…

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  • Amsterdam Central Command

    I am really excited, I get to participate in the go/no go decision tonight with EHT Central Command!! We’re going to decide if tomorrow is the big day for Sgr A* (remember, my favorite black hole), when we might observe for something like 10 hours. What is extra cool is that we have some overlapping coverage with three X-ray satellites in orbit (Chandra, NuSTAR, Swift), as well as hopefully also the VLT, which is the premier European-run optical/IR facility at the moment, in Chile. It is very hard to get so many instruments to look at the same object at the same time, so if all goes well we’ll have…

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  • As if it weren’t enough…

    So the first EHT run last night has gone really well, though of course there were a few technical issues. I really enjoyed being on the Slack channel and following the communications in realtime from all the stations across the globe. Not to mention the snarky comments (people competing between SPT and LMT for being a “big ungainly sail” when it comes to wind disrupting pointing accuracy…who knew??). But if that weren’t enough, the black hole X-ray binary Cyg X-3 decided to have a massive flare!! So at the 11th hour, with the folk having been up all night, there was a flash decision to point 3 telescopes (JCMT-SMA-SMT) of…

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  • It’s on now!

    The Event Horizon Telescope (see here for a nice article about the project) just triggered it’s first 2017 observation, the first ever with phased ALMA at its core, as well as several other facilities across the globe of the Earth!! Tonight we’ll be observing the tiniest scales ever seen before in “Track D”, which means the supermassive black holes and jets of systems: 3C279, M87, and OJ 287 (which may even have two black holes)!! We also have a ton of great multiwavelength coverage. I’m super excited, wish us luck that the weather holds, and we get good data!!

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  • It’s official!

    I just got back from a month at UT Austin as a visiting Tinsley Scholar, which was great. Two years ago I went for three months as a Tinsley Professor, and got to bring part of my research group with me, but this time was a smaller scale visit. I started two projects that I had been discussing for awhile, but now these have (I hope) legs. One is together with Prof. John Kormendy, and is being led by my former postdoc Dr. Rich Plotkin, now a senior fellow at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and also includes Dr. James Miller-Jones, from the same institute. This paper involves a relationship…

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