Hello folks,

This here is the long promised field trip entry. Sorry it took so long; I was having some trouble getting all the pictures to upload properly. But problems are now solved, so without further ado...

The Owens Valley Field Trip! (interspersed with pictures of Bronson to keep the masses happy)

As Jenn was saying, I had a nice field trip up to Owens Valley during the days of 16-19 November. It's about 5 hours north-east of Pasadena, up past the Mojave Desert. We left on the Thursday and came back on the Sunday. The drive was pretty nice -- we stopped for gas in the town of Mojave, which is home to the SpaceShipOne, the rocket-ship which won the X-prize 2 years ago. They had a bill-board there. Neato.

We also stopped in Redrock Canyon which was a neat area. The restrooms there didn't have roofs. Here's a picture of Elijah sitting on the can.

We had plenty to occupy ourselves once at Owens Valley. We brought an 8" telescope to take advantage of the dark, dark skies. We went to the hot springs (twice). Oh, and we learned some stuff about the radio telescopes. Before getting on to the boring educational part, here's a few pictures of the Valley. It's a really beautiful place.

The Owens Valley Radio Observatory is currently home to four experiments. There is the Sunyaev Zel'dovich Array, which is trying to find galaxy clusters based on their effect on the Cosmic Microwave Background, there's the Solar Array, the 5.5m telescope which is ramping up to do an all-sky survey, and the 40m telescope which is currently being retrofitted with a new detector. Here's a picture of the 40m:It might look familiar to you Charlie Sheen fans, as it was the set of the film "The Arrival". The control room is actually inside the base of the telescope. We did some calibrations on the 40m, which required bringing a box of liquid nitrogen up to the prime focus (that little cage supported above the dish). I went up there. It was pretty neat. The telescope points at the horizon while people are in the cage, but you still have to climb across a bare ladder 20m above the ground to get there. One surprising thing was that at the prime focus, my cell phone had remarkably good reception. This is because the telescope was pointing at the cell phone tower. It was like having a 40m antenna on my phone.

Here's a picture of the observatory office building. It might look familiar to you Jodie Foster fans, as some scenes of the movie "Contact" were filmed there.

We also went up to Cedar Flat (an hour's drive East into the mountains), which is where the "new" CARMA (Combined Array for Research in Millimetre Astronomy) array is located. The dishes aren't actually new, though. The smaller, shiny ones are from Northern California, where they used to comprise the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA) Array, whereas the larger white ones are owned by Caltech and used to be down in Owens Valley. The dishes have just recently been joined together to form this even better observatory.

After seeing CARMA, we drove up into the mountains to see the bristlecone pine forest. Here's me during a brief stop on the drive:Bristlecone pines are among the oldest trees in the world. They grow very slowly and hence are very hardy. The oldest ones are ~4000 years old. Here's a picture of me in front of a 4000 year old tree Here's a picture of me next to a ~50 year old tree. Neat stuff.

Anyways, it was a fun trip. I hope to go back soon: the cottage up there is apparently available for booking, even if you're not observing... very tempting.

My classmates are: Back Row, R-L: Megan, Chelsea, Agatha, Ann Marie, Laura, and Elijah.

Front Row, R-L: Me, Walter, Varun, Yacine, and Mike.