Hello from the mountain

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It’s just past 4am Hawaiian time (about 2pm GMT) on my first night of observing and I need something to help me stay awake so I’m writing this post. I’m at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JMCT) on Mauna Kea, 13,796 ft above sea level. Becuase it’s so high, being up here is pretty difficult – you can really feel the lack of oxygen and you have to be constantly on the alert for the symptoms of altitude sickness. Mainly I’m trying not to move around too much! The control room of the JCMT, where I sit, rotates with the telescope so every now and then it starts rocking. It’s a bit disconcerting but I think I’m getting used to it. The biggest problem is that the toilet moves as it’s on the non-moving floor downstairs, and it can take a while to find it!

I’m here to map the clouds of molecular hydrogen in 50 nearby galaxies using the HARP-B instrument. However, this gas is really difficult to detect directly so what I’m actually measuring is carbon monoxide, which tends to hang out in the same clouds.

People are only allowed to spend 14 hours out of every 24 up here at the summit, so we all stay at a dormitory complex called Hale Pohaku down at 9,300 ft. It takes about 40 minutes to drive up to the summit, mainly because the first section of the road isn’t paved. We didn’t come up to the telescope until 7:30pm tonight so it was already dark when we set off, meaning we had a beautiful view of the night sky all the way. I was also lucky enough to see the zodiacal light, which comes from sunlight reflecting off dust in the Solar System. You need a very dark site, with no moon or light pollution to get a glimpse of it because it’s so faint. I didn’t have the right camera to get a photo of it myself but the picture on the left, taken at an observatory in Chile, shows it well.

When we reached the summit, most of the other telescopes up here had already opened up and started working. This meant that I got to see the Keck artificial guide star laser, that I’ve blogged about before, shooting up into the sky.

It’s nearly 5:30am now so I’d better wrap this up before I get too tired to write straight. I’ll be up here for another 2.5 hours tonight, and then for the next 6 nights after that, so this probably isn’t the last post from the mountain. If you’ve got any questions about what’s it’s like up here please leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them in as coherent a way as possible!