Observations

Things are winding down in the field a bit - tomorrow we'll be briefly down to 5 people for a few hours between Aubra leaving and Hans arriving. The receiver, telescope and readout are behaving well enough now to keep things running with only a few people. We've already achieved many of the instrument demonstrating astronomical observations we planned to in California, including:

• Jupiter - the brightest point source in the sky at 150GHz, for mapping our beams and calibrating throughput
• Tau A, the crab nebula - A bright polarized source in the sky, for demonstrating and calibrating polarization sensitivity. Humans saw the supernova progenitor 1000 years ago.
  
• The Galaxy - We're observing this one the same way we'll observe the cosmic microwave background, but it's much brighter, so it has a fast turnaround time and acts as a dry run for science.
• Saturn, Mars, 3C279, J1229+0203, etc - An assortment of sources across the sky, planets and the brighter quasars, whose positions have been measured to exquisite precision using optical telescopes and interferometer arrays like CARMA. We measure where they appear to be in our telescope, and check that against where we know they actually are.
  

It's an exciting time to be analyzing data for Polarbear.

Hair cut

The moon is waxing gibbous again, which means the Polarbear receiver and I have been out in the field for nearly 2 months, and it's time for a hair cut. Thanks to Kam for picking up the shears in Bishop, and Dave for cleaning up the back and tolerating the mess I made of the bathroom.