Photo tour of the observatory

All technical information given here comes from the NIAC website. You can read more about the radio telescope and the other science done at Arecibo at www.naic.edu.


Me outside the visitors' center holding my Arecibo ID with the 1000-ft diameter telescope behind me. The dish is 167 feet deep and covers an area of about twenty acres.


The lift (on right side of Gregorian dome) going up to the platform. This gives a good idea of the scale of the platform. The azimuth arm, the bow shaped structure, is 328 feet long. Cables attached to each corner of the platform run to large concrete blocks under the reflector (the dish). These cables are attached to giant jacks which allow for adjustment of the height of each corner of the platform to millimeter precision.


One of the three towers from which the platform is suspended. This tower is 265 feet high. There is another of this same height and a third that is 365 feet high. The tops of the three are at the same elevation. They hold the 900 ton platform 450 feet above the dish. The combined volume of reinforced concrete in all three towers is 9,100 cubic yards.


The living room in the family unit where the guys live and where we all hang out. It's the only cabin with a living room. Elly, Jodi Foster's character in Contact, lived in the other family unit, which is exactly the same as this one.


Jamie, John and I about to put our herb and tomato bread in the oven. Cooking and baking are our main forms of entertainment while in the observatory. We've had some delicious meals; calzones, minestrone soup, pizza, homemade breads of various sorts, eggplant lasagna, quiches, cornbread, burritos, pies, cakes, cookies, are just some of the examples.


On the porch of one of the small cabins where the girls live. The porch is the only social space in these tiny cabins. To reach these cabins from our offices we have to climb 120 stairs. To get there from the cafeteria, there are a total of about 170 stairs. Add at least another 40 stairs if you want to come up from the pool and another 30 or so if you want to go from our cabins up to the guy's family unit. Four flights of stairs to my room at Smith next year is going to be a breeze!


The pool, our other main source of entertainment. This was a brilliant addition to the observatory several years ago.


A beautiful evening sky at the observatory.


Cool trees in the jungle in which we live.


The path we take to get from work to our cabins.


One of our many reptile neighbors sitting on the handrail of the 120 stairs we climb to go to between work and home each day.


The main office building through the trees with the telescope platform and Gregorian dome behind it. (To go from the cafeteria to the offices there must be another 40 odd stairs.


The cafeteria and dining shelter seen from the main office building.


The control room. This also shows up in the movie Contact.


The telescope as seen out the control room window.


The instrument room behind the control room.


The telescope as seen out our office window. I actually don't work in this office, but other students do. All of our offices are on the floor above the control room.


The platform lit up at night for the working painters. This is our unique REU 2007 view. We don't get to use the telescope because of the paint work being done and it's prevented us from being able to go up to see the instruments on the platform. That's quite a bummer. But, we do get to see the platform lit up at night. This picture doesn't do that impressive sight justice.


Another view of the telescope.

First Month in Puerto Rico

Well, I’ve been here a month now, so I figured it was time to give you all an update. The most recent news is that we, our group of students, now have a puppy. She’s an adorable little dog that found us in a parking lot. She officially belongs to my roommate, but we all take care of it. She’s currently living outside our cabin and is SUPER cute!! We’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen to her when we leave in a month or so, but we’re pretty hopeful that someone else will find her irresistible and will want to keep her. We’re just enjoying her cuteness and curiosity right now.

Also, in non-work related news, yesterday was Constitution Day here in Puerto Rico. It’s an official holiday so I spent the day reading the new Harry Potter book. It was a relaxing way to spend a day!

My work is also going well, though I was at a bit of a standstill for about a week until this afternoon. I’ve finished looking through all of our data cubes for galaxies and have compiled a list of what I think are possibilities. My advisors now have to do the same. They split the work and one has finished, but I’m waiting for the second half. While I’m waiting, I’ve been working on another little project. I’ve been looking at the continuum sources (sources that emit light at all wavelengths) in our data. I made a list of the 25 or so brightest ones. Then I looked through our data divided by frequency to see if there’s any hydrogen emission or absorption near the continuum sources. If there is, that could help us understand more about the continuum sources (if it’s emission) or about stuff, like gas clouds, that might be between the continuum sources and us (if it’s absorption). I’ve completed the list of possible emission and absorption. It didn’t look too hopeful to me, but my advisor seems to think that the data I compiled may be worth something. So, now, if I have time, I can do the same thing for the smaller section of sky for which we also have data. The bad news about this is that the work is tedious and not particularly interesting. However, if my advisor things it’s worth doing, it probably is and it would be cool if some new information came out of my search.

The good news, however, is that I now have something else to keep me busy hopefully until my second advisor finishes looking through his half of the data cubes. This afternoon both my advisors surprised me by coming into my office to teach me how to use the program Miriad to get spectral data from the galaxies on our compiled list. The program’s not too complicated. I’m just telling it where my object is in our data cubes, how large of a range of velocities it should us to calculate the spectral data, how to calculate the noise in the image. Then it plots the flux against the velocity, measures the velocity, the velocity width, and the flux across the velocity range I specify (the galaxy). It also finds a better position for the object than the one I give it. In addition it tells us things like how much noise is in the data and gives us various ways to measure the flux. For now, I’m just making the plots and saving the output information. When I finish with that, or at least have a good start, my advisors are going to teach me how to actually analyze all that information. It’s looking like we have some good stuff. We may have about 30 galaxies!!

Let’s see, what else has happened? Each weekend for the first couple weeks I was here, we went on a trip somewhere. The first weekend we visited an island called Vieques off the east coast. The highlights of that trip were seeing wild horses on the beach and going to a bioluminescent bay. The bay was incredible. We went out in kayaks. At first we didn’t see anything and then we started to see light when we made a stroke with our paddles. It was as if our paddles were on fire with some magical white flames. It was so cool. Then the water in our kayaks started to glow if we moved around in it. They let us get out of the boats and swim around in the water. That was really neat. Our whole bodies looked like they were glowing.


Me in front of a cool cafe in Vieques.

Another weekend trip took us to a small town that used to be a U.S. Navy base, but in now just home to a small airport and the main U.S. Coast Guard station. Most of the group was away that weekend, so there were only four of us on the weekend trip. A retired observatory worker lives there and he acted as our tour guide all weekend. We rented bikes and rode around the coast, doing some of the hardest off-rode riding I’ve ever done. We went down this narrow, steep, root-covered trail to get down to the coastline. It was quite the bumpy ride. I was amazed at how much the mountain bike tires could take as long as I had a bit of speed.



Me on the trusty mountain bike.

Once down at the coast, we hit some thick patches of sand that were a bit of an adventure to get through. Often these encounters resulted in us pushing rather than riding the bikes through to solid ground. We rode to a great, calm snorkeling spot and poked around there for some time. It was my first time snorkeling. It was pretty cool. A neat thing about PR is that in a lot of places, the reefs come right up to the shore. You don’t have to go out very far at all to see some neat fish and coral.

Saturday night was the beginning fiesta for San Juan, el bautista (San John the Baptist), the patron saint of PR. Our guide’s next-door neighbor agreed to take us to the celebrations. We went with her and her boyfriend to a crowded beach to wait for midnight. At midnight, or as close as we could figure with our five watches marking different times, we walked into the ocean where we proceeded to fall backwards into the water 3 times. According to the Puerto Ricans this is tradition and is supposed to bring good luck. No one seemed to know exactly why, but I assume the falling into the water is supposed to be a reenactment of baptism. Probably reaffirming your faith in this way each year is supposed to make your life better. As with so many originally religious traditions, this one has been absorbed by the culture at large and the night is now just an excuse to have a big beach party with all your friends and do something that now seems rather silly because it’s tradition.



The full beach on Sunday, the day of Saint John the baptist.

We spent the next few weekends here at the observatory or on day trips. We visited El Yunque, a rainforest on the island. There are biology students there also doing an REU. We got to meet them and see their research station and parts of the woods that are off limits to the public. We enjoyed a lovely afternoon in and around small pools above a small waterfall.


The whole group in front of the waterfall in El Yunque park.



Me with a huge plant in the rain forest.


My two roommates, Amanda and Cat, and I in a tower overlooking the hills of El Yunque's cloud forest.

Another weekend, the students from El Yunque visited us at the observatory. We all went to the Camuy caves, near Arecibo. The caves house the world’s third largest underground river. Having visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and various other small caves near Berea, the Camuy caves weren’t that impressive to me. We basically just visited a large cavern hall and a bat cave. The neatest parts were seeing where the river used to run through the cave we visited and where it now runs about 100 feet below the cave, drinking from the natural spring, seeing the huge sinkholes that have opened the cave up to the ground above, and then realizing that we could fit two them inside our telescope!!



Diana filling her water bottle from the natural spring.


Me, Camille, Diana, and Amanda in the cave park sitting on a sculpture of a coqui, a tree frog that fills the night with sound.


Matt grilling hot dogs for lunch at the observatory during out cookout with the biology students.

Another highlight of their visit was that I finally got a real tour of the observatory. Our REU coordinator took the biology students on a tour and I tagged along. I got to hear the explanations of the various devices in the control room for the first time. We also went under the dish, which we can do whenever we want since they’re not using the telescope this summer. Still, it was a unique experience because, on this particular day, the painters weren’t working on the platform suspended above the dish. This meant that we could walk under the hole in the middle of the dish. Usually we can’t go down there because something could fall on us from above and kill us from the velocity it would gain in the descent. We went to the very center of the dish and could look up at the platform and Gregorian dome above. We also got to climb up some stairs into the dish itself. It was so cool to stand in the middle of the 1000-ft in diameter dish. It really gave a different perspective on its hugeness. We could see up into the Gregorian dome and see the secondary and tertiary mirrors. Since they’re painting up there, we haven’t been able to take the usual REU student tour up there. That’s our big disappointment of the summer, so being able to see inside, even from 450 feet below, was a big deal.


Me in the dish with the Gregorian dome above me.


Me standing inside the radio telescope's primary reflecting surface (the dish).

Another highlight of the past weeks was the 4th of July. Since Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, it’s in the delightful position of celebrating double the number of holidays; they celebrate all the American holidays as well as the traditional Puerto Rican ones. We went back to the old navy base town for the 4th of July. Since the U.S. Coast Guard has their main station there, they put on a fireworks show for the town. We spent the day at a tiny, but lovely beach. It was literally down a cliff from our guide’s friend’s house. The entry into the water was a bit rocky and the waves were a bit strong, but we had fun splashing around and jumping in the waves.



A view of the shoreline from our guide's friend's house.


The small group that went to the beach.

In the evening, we joined the party in our guide’s neighborhood. We enjoyed the fireworks from the roof, barbequed our dinner and tasted the delicious Puerto Rican food our hosts made. We also had a bit of a dance party in the backyard, making up ridiculous dances about everyday activities and sharing and dancing them all in a circle. Some of the favorites were “climbing the banana tree and eating a banana,” “surfing,” “checking the mail,” and “blowing a bubble with bubble gum.” It was a hilarious evening full of ridiculousness!

So, things are going well. The other students are going to start leaving this coming week, which is going to be sad. We all have to be here 10 weeks but we arrived at different times. I’ll be one of the last to leave. I’m enjoying myself, but I’ll be excited to get home. I’ve been gone for a long time.

Week and Weekend 2

So, it's the beginning of week three, and my computer is still doing all the work for me. It's now griding all the data into 8 data cubes. Basically this means it's taking all the data and dividing it into 8 boxes. The data has three type of information in it: right ascension, declination, and the frequency of the waves. Right ascension and declination give the coordinates in the sky, like latitude and longitude on Earth and the frequency can be converted into a velocity. All the data has been taken of the emission produced by the hyperfine spin-switch of neutral hydroden. This particular energy level switch gives off electromagnetic waves of 21 cm or 1420 MHz. However, since this emission is coming from all different sources outside our galaxy and due to the expansion of the universe, which causes the wavelengths of the light to be redshifted, we detect the neutral hydrogen emission at wavelengths different from 1420 MHz when it comes from outside our galaxy. The amount of redshift in the wavelength (which goes hand-in-hand with a change in frequency). Got all that?

So, what the program is doing, is cutting the data into 8 sections, as I said before. Then, it's splitting each of these sections into velocity ranges. What we end up with is what's called a data cube. It's like a 3-D cube of data the computer creates. On two of the axis, the computer puts right ascension and declination. That tells you where in our sky the data was taken from. Then, on the third axis, the computer puts the velocity. We can then manuever the cube around to look at it from various angles.

While the computer is doing all this, I'm reading difficult physics papers, trying to understand how all this works and what all we can find out from this sort of survey. Most of the papers are written for graduate students, so they're quite a challenge for me. Fortunately, my mentor is very patient and willing to explain anything I don't understand until I do. :)

Though the week days are still kind of dull, I'm having a wonderful time on the weekends. This past weekend we went to a small town that was once a US airforce base, but is now just a nice small town, sitll with lots of reminders of what it once was, of course. We were lucky to have a local guide all weekend; an retired man who used to work at the observatory, but now lives in the small town, showed us all around. On Saturday we went biking all day, all around the town and countryside near the ocean. We also went snorkeling, which was a lot of fun.

Saturday night we celebrated the beginning of St. John the Baptist's day, which was Sunday. St. John is the patron saint of PR (the island was once named for him). The celebration starts at midnight Saturday night. It's tradition to walk into the ocean and fall backwards into it 3 (or 9) times (the number depends on who you ask). It's supposed to be for good luck, though no one seems to know why. Our guide's next door neighbor took us to the beach to participate. We were pretty tired after biking all day thought so we didn't stay very long after midnight to see what other things were going on. I don't imagine we missed much. It looked like it would have just been more drinking and dancing by the Puerto Ricans and then a horrible traffic jam to get away from the beach. We fortunately missed that!

On Sunday our friendly guide gave us a tour around the neighboring town and the beaches. We spent the remaining part of the afternoon on the beach, snorkeling, reading, and just generally relaxing.

Now I'm back at the observatory. I'm hoping the program will be done with the 8 data cubes by Wednesday morning so I can start the next step of the process. I fear it will be more processing, which means I'll continue to read physics. Oh well. It's all part of the process, so I guess I'm learning how it all works. At least I really like my advisor. He's Armenian but grew up in Syria. Last week he gave me a mini lesson on Middle Eastern history concerning Armenia. It was interesting!

more on first work day

Hello all, I just thought I'd give a little update on my first day
here. I sleep well last night and feel a bit better than yesterday.
I'm still sad about not being in Mexico; everything is different here,
as is to be expected, and it constantly reminds me I'm not in Mexico
anymore. But I know the feelings are normal and I'm sure by the end of
this week or the next I'm going to be loving it here. The girls I'm
living with are nice. I think we're going to be changing housing
around a bit right now because we girls are really squashed together.

I met my two advisers today and they both seem friendly, though two
different characters. One seems more on top of things than the other
and is easier to understand, though they're both foriegners. One is
from Armenia and grew up in Syria, or at least I think those are the right countries (he's the one I can understand
better) and the other's from Wales, I think. The second one talks
quietly and that combined with his accent makes him a bit difficult to
understand.

All the Puerto Rican workers I've met so far seem really nice. The
cooks were explaining to me about the different kinds of beans they
have here. They have a different name than in Mexico, though now I've
forgotten it again. I'm sure since rice, beans, and chicken are the
stapel foods here I'll quickly learn the name. The human resources
woman was really impressed with my Spanish, which was nice. The gaurd
that drove me here last night is probably my favorite adult here so
far. He was super talkative and just really open and helpful. He even
called this afternoon to check in on me. :) Basically I'm speaking
Spanish with the people who know it, which are basically the Puerto
Rican staff members. The official language of the observatory is
English, so that's how I talk to professors and the other students.
Also, most of them don't seem to really speak a lot of Spanish. A
bunch of the professors are foreign and speak other languages besides
English. For example, today we had a talk about coordinate and time
systems from a guy from Sweden. He kept pronouncing "calendar" like
ca-LAN-dar instead of CA-len-dar.

So far I feel a bit lost about my project and a bit overwhelmed by the
reading my professor gave me, but I know that's perfectly normal. No
one else had any clue what they were doing when they arrived either
and now they're all going strong on their projects (I'm the second
last to arrive). I'm sure once we get started I'll have specific
questions and will be on my way to learning how to do everything.

It's neat to be here in the jungle to do science. The animals, mostly
bugs and frogs, are louder at night than during the day. It's nice to
be out of the city and really hear the nature around us. A lot of
people apparently had trouble sleeping the first couple nights. I
didn't have any problem though. All the noise help drown out the sound
of the sand blasting their doing as a part of the huge painting job
they're doing on the telescope right now.

Well, I should go get a start on the reading. One of the girls in the
group has her birthday tomorrow and apparently we're going to have
cake and ice cream at midnight to celebrate. I'd like to at least do a
little bit of work before that.

First real work day

Well, I actually started working on my project today. We're starting to prepare the data for analysis. It's not very interesting work yet, but I'm learning, more than anything because basically I know nothing about what I'm doing. Everything here is done in Linex. I have almost zero experience with Unix machines (so little in fact that I don't know if I've spelled the names correctly or not). That's my first task, but it's also one I can't spend all my time on; I pretty much just have to learn it as I go along. Today we copied the data files onto the workspace I'll be using. We went to lunch while the computer did that. Then in the afternoon we started the process of calibrating the data. A program does this for us, so we just had to set the parameters and hit "start." It ran for about four hours today while I tried to read a radio astronomy book they gave me. Neither of us made much progress. I think the computer got through about a quarter of the data and I also read about a quarter of what the professor suggested I read. However, I think the computer probably understood more of its work than I did. The book is extremely dense and not really accesible to an undergraduate student. I pushed through, understanding about 5% of what I was reading I'm afraid. I figure I'll try to read all he assigned to me and it'll be ok if I don't really understand much. I'll at least have read enough terms and ideas that if they ever come up in our work I should be able to recognize them as something I read about and maybe in the context of our work I'll have questions and can learn more. Plus, I know some of the other students also got books on their research areas and they said they were equally as dense and they couldn't get much out of them either. At least I'm not alone.

I feel like I know nothing about what I'm doing. I'm feeling I have less physics and astronomy training than I'd like. But at the same time, they knew what experience I have had when they chose me to come work for them, and the guy that picked us works in the same office as one of my advisors, so I figure they knew what they were getting with me. My professors have been really patient and don't seem at all irratated by my lack of knowledge, even about Linex. They were more annoyed, though even in this case I'd hardly call it annoyed, that the program didn't give us some sort of Linex intro sheet to give us the basic commands and information to start off with. They were sort of like, "huh, we'll have to talk to someone about that so they have one for next year." Their calm, patient attitude and willingness to explain has been great. I think working with them will be fine.

I'm still struggling with the differences between here and Mexico. Today a girl in our group asked if it's hard for me to speak in English now. I told her that it's not too bad. English is my first language so it's starting to take its dominant position again. There are times when I think of the word in Spanish and I have to sort of force my mouth to change its form to say the corresponding word in English. That's a bit strange. After I stopped talking to her, I realized that what's really harder than the language is figuring out who I am again in English. I didn't really realize how much a culture and language, even a foreign one, can affect your thoughts, behavior, humor, and reaction to other people. I feel like I'm coping with not only the normal "how do I fit into this new group?" feelings but also lots of questions about how to fit into a different culture, how to make jokes, what to laugh at, how to respond, how to get the reaction I'd like from people, etc. It's very odd. I didn't experience this so much when I returned to the states from Spain. Perhaps I was too focused on the language there to change so much with the culture. Or maybe Spanish culture isn't as different from American culture as Mexican culture. Or perhaps since I went home to KY where I already had friends and family and an well established role and lots of experience with the people and situations I didn't have the same difficulty. Here I have to start over. Whenever I'm in a new group and place, I know I take a little time to adapt and find my place. Part of my feelings are the same ones I always have, but I think they're amplifed by the cultural differences. I'm trying to talk to the Puerto Rican staff to connect a bit to the latino culture. Maybe this will help the change not be too extreme. I almost feel more comfortable conversing in Spanish with them than in English with my collegues.

I guess Merilie and Gerardo were right; I'm different in Spanish!

Right, what am I doing here anyway?

Briefly: I'm here in Puerto Rico working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory which is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center. I'm being paid by the National Science Foundation through the REU program (Research Experience for Undergraduates). I'm helping Cornell professors Robert Minchin and Emmanuel Momjian look for galaxies in the "avoidance zone." The avoidance zone is the stuff that's on the other side of the Milky Way and that only radio telescopes can see because of all the gas and dust in our galaxy blocks the views of other telescopes. I'll be here for 10 weeks. There are about 10 other college stuents and one grad student in the REU program.

I made it

Hi all. I just thought I'd let you all know that I'm in Puerto Rico now, at the observatory. I arrived this evening after a semi-uneventful trip. I didn't realize I needed to get a paper stamped, and probably my visa too, as I left Mexico. The woman at the desk didn't explain very well what I had to do, but had I not been totally exhausted from spending the night up with Julio and Gerardo and feeling pretty glum about leaving Mexico, I probably would have paid more attention to my surroundings and seen the migration desk, or to the form and seen that it needed a stamp or thought about the fact that you have to get your visa and passport stamped when you leave a country. The delta people didn't know what happens if you don't get the form stamped and so far I haven't had to pay for it, but I imagine if I go back to Mexico they're going to fine me. I think I may call the Mexican consulate in Boston to see if there's any way to take care of the problem before I go back or at least to see how much it's going to cost me next time I go. Other than them dumping out my water (I thought the liquids rule had changed) and confiscating my toothpaste (some of their rules are really stupid these days), the trip went about as can be expected. I read Harry Potter on my first flight to keep myself from feeling miserable about leaving, being tired, and screwing up with the form. It was an effective method. On my second flight, which was delayed about an hour, I managed to sleep a little bit.

A friendly Arecibo security gaurd met me at the airport. It was nice to chat in Spanish with him on the way to the observatory. He was extremely friendly and took me to get groceries, which cost me the incredibly expensive American price of $40!! I'm going to have to get used to the prices outside of Mexico. I couldn't stop thinking in pesos and how ridiculously expensive the food was, and of the comparative low-looking quality of the vegetables. I'm hoping at least the quality will improve as I figure out where to buy. I couldn't find the chiles I wanted to make salsa, so I'm glad I brought my favorite comercial salsa from Mexico. That will have to do until I find a market that sells chiles or until I learn how to make Puerto Rican food. I think that's going to be the most effective method to successful shopping.

I'm staying, at least for now, in a small cabin on stilts with two other girls: Amanda, a 20 year old from Purdue in IL, and Kat, whose 26th birthday was today and who's studying a masters at NM state. We had a little get together in the boys' family suite (into which we're hoping the girls are going to be able to move because it's larger and there are more of us) to celebrate Kat's birthday. Everyone is here now except one other girl who arrives on the 28th. One girl's already been here a month. Everyone seems really nice. They've been going on trips each weekend and they really seem to have bonded well. There's lots of joking going on.

Now I'm ready for bed. I'm exhausted. Tomorrow I'm going to start figuring things out around here. I have to find my professor, get a key for our cabin, and fill out paper work with human relations. I'm hoping someone will also show me around the grounds. The only not so great thing I see so far about being here is that they're painting the telescope. That means we won't be able to use it directly and that they are sand blasting randomly during the night, which is loud.