HTT at JAO dedication

On Sunday, July 11th, nineteen members of Huan's family came out to the site for an official dedication of the Huan Tran Telescope at the James Ax Observatory. In their presence, we installed a plaque commemorating the project's namesake scientists.

Unwelcome Visitor

I almost stepped on a rattlesnake sunning himself next to our storage container. He then decided to hide under the container and we thought it wasn't a good idea to leave him there. Fortunately Bill knew exactly what to do:

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.

Automated operation

The Polarbear receiver with operating bolometers ran continuously as the HTT scanned the sky all night last night. We all left it to get some sleep, but as of dawn, all systems appear to be working. As you can see from the dawn photograph, the weather was imperfect by morning. We'll have to look at the data to see how opaque the atmosphere was during the night. Jupiter will rise above an elevation angle of 20 degrees in 5 minutes, and the telescope will start observing it as soon as it does

Days 17-19, First Light!

Polarbear at HTT ready for observations

Preparing for observations

The bolometers react to elevation changes!

And there was much rejoicing.

Ready for planet observations in the daytime

Looking for Mars....

There it is!

A celebratory cup of noodles

The next day: Jupiter!

Ian and Nate working on scans

The traditional first light Apple Strudel

Days 12-16, Cooldown

The aftermath of assembling and

installing the receiver. Where's the broom?

Ziggy assembling the readout crate

Ian arrived along with Nate from UCSD

Chase and his stylish hat

Peter and Marius finished weatherproofing the electronics crate.

Mike and Steve from OVRO help reinstall the electronics

crate.

Ziggy getting his manlift driver's license

Dave working on measuring optics alignment

with a theodolite

Preparing the telescope for observations

Dave and Adrian preparing for optics alignment measurements

from inside the telescope.

Measuring the position of the primary mirror

Ziggy and Marius install the readout electronics inside

the electronics crate.