I'm just back from a week in Hawaii. No vacation, not at all. Trips to Hawaii are almost always business trips for astronomers. At an altitude of 13, 796 feet, Mauna Kea is one of the best astronomical sites in the world, often having exquisite image quality and dry air (thanks to steady airflow over the Pacific and an inversion layer).
In baseball, a great player can hit .400, and that's not too different from the chances of getting a good clear night with no clouds. Some sites are better than that, some worse, and astronomers also distinguish between "spectroscopic" nights and "photometric" nights, since it's usually possible to take spectra through some thin, occasional clouds and get good results. Even .400 hitters go through slumps. Statistics ensures it.
I "observed" at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, an infrared-optimized 3-meter telescope. Four nights. No science data. We did have fog, rain, snow, and ice, however. Last month it was Kitt Peak, and two minutes of science data over four nights. Sometimes observational astronomy is rough. That's one reason why astronomers take on a lot of projects, because weather or equipment problems can make a relatively simple project require years to complete. My grad student got to learn at least that much.
There were a few good things about the trip, I suppose. I discovered that living at altitude in Wyoming (7200 feet) made the summit of Mauna Kea much more tolerable. For instance, in the past I would always get a bad headache the first couple of nights, and that was absent this time. I got to eat at Cafe Pesto, in Hilo, which is a great restaurant. Also, through an error by Aloha Airlines, I got bumped up to first class on the Honolulu-to-Denver part of the trip, which was nice but not enough to make a redeye flight a great experience.
Posted by Mike at April 1, 2005 07:22 PM