Day #27 (2009/01/10) Where is Rémi?

It has been 6 days of bad or improper weather now. Today, things finally started to like they were improving! Yesterday night was supposed to arrive a new colleague, Rémi. He will be the lone team member that will stay here for one month. However, due to a snow storm in Madrid, his flight was canceled. Now 24 hours after this, we have still not received further news of him. We must introduce him to the telescope and pass on the ways of operating it and the knowledge we picked up here. Let's hope he says something soon.

Tonight we were almost opening the dome, when for the first time in 6 nights humidity dropped below 100%. Unfortunately, it's lowest value was 92%, and no dome was opened!

The daily feed

What do we eat at 2400m?

Unlike our cavemen ancestors, we do not go out hunting protected animal species in a natural park.. Our preys are modern, yet not too synthetic, pre-cooked or microwave-cookable meals. The available culinary selection is extensive, indirectly due to our rented car that allows us access to supermarkets. We also have the observatory's residency that provides good food for decent price, given our location.
But, indeed, the most cost-effective meals we eat come from the supermarket. Our favorite supermarket is the HiperDino at La Esperanza.
We mainly eat at home what we buy at the supermarket. But about once every two or three days we have lunch at the observatory's residency.

The kitchen at the observatory's residency is run by a Venezuelan chef, with taste for curious and unusual dishes, though they are usually very good for my taste. Things like "arroz negro", our last "strange" meal there. But there appear to be days when the chef is absent, nearing the weekend, on Fridays and Saturdays. On those days, food is usually not as memorable.. But the complete process of eating is adjusted to the kitchen being 2 km higher than any market. Only two main courses exist for lunch, and one for dinner. Lunch must be reserved until 10:30 of the same day, and dinners until 15:00. It can be done in person, by phone, or even by filling a not-very-good form on the internet.

But anyway, the "Arroz negro" or "black rice", I believe is the best dish to explain and illustrate the type of food chosen by our chef. To start with, the name is oddly simple. It's just a coloring adjective followed by a noun. When I chose the dish, I mostly chose it for its name, almost wondering what it could. After choosing, it came to me that the most effective way I could think of to turning rice black, was to use cuttlefish ink. Well, when the day came to eat it I realized I had guessed that part correctly. However, surprises did not end there. How unexpected would you find eating seafood on top of a 2400m mountain? The black rice had in it mussels, clams, and cuttlefish.. It also had green lentils and another vegetable in it that gave it a really nice taste. I can't recall that one, now.. But I do recall that in no occasion I found a single grain of rice.. Either it was there -- smashed -- or it wasn't -- absolutely absent!

Day #26 (2009/01/09) It snowed!

Today, was the day when Augusto Gil was remembered!

I am from a generation of Portuguese Lisbon city kids that read a famous and memorable poem by Augusto Gil in school, called "A balada da Neve" (in Portuguese). Please read it only if you understand Portuguese, and under no occasion translate the first phrase with an online translator, please.. You would end up with "They beat has led, lightly, as who flame for me". Believe me, this (if it ever makes sense) is far from the meaning of the original poem.
The poem is about this sound, this light sound.. Sound of a gentle know at the door or elsewhere unimportant, as if someone would be calling.. But it could not be people doing it, and it could not be rain as much! Alike, wind could be not, for the quietly melancholic pine tree needles had been soundless a while past...

But this beautiful poem came to memory only because of the visual notion I had made of snow! Nothing else even faintly resembled reality! This reality, at least! Pine trees? - none! Windless? no, there is some wind! Light sound? - what sound? I can't hear it! Knocking sound? - are you deaf? I can't hear a thing!
None of the poem's description fitted reality.. This reality.. But it was snowing! That, indeed, it was!
But I remember so well, running outside towards the observatory to go get my camera.. I was running against the wind, and the harmlessly cold snow flocks were attaching be. I could hear the anger of impacts against my jacket. I arrived at the observatory filled with crispy white dots that refused to meld against the coldness of my clothes. But when I run back at the same speed of the wind, snow flocks danced in front of me in a magical and inconstant uncertainty..
The lazzy white flocks lasted around 30 minutes, flying around like lost ants, before wind-rushed rain washed it from memory.. It was only enough time to leave a short-lived white sheet of color over vegetation, rocks, and picnic tables.

Day #25 (2009/01/08) Nothing new

Today, tonight, bad weather, it was!
Go ahead, guess the value of today's relative humidity (easy).. Now guess the average temperature! Ok, that one is trickier, the average temperature may have been around 0ºC. We had a minimum of -4ºC and a maximum of +4ºC.. 50% negative values, 50% positive.. Average, zero..
For days in a row, the weather here has...

Wait a minute!.. What am I writing?.. Why is it each time there is nothing to say we -- BAM! -- talk about the weather!.. I could go sleep: I'm in an astronomical observatory with no possibility to observe los astros, because of the weather! -- Oh, there it is, I'm talking about the weather again!
I should say something else, improvise a different excuse for not working.. Something stupid, say, something like: "We could not leave the house because we left the key outside the door turned! But then people would ask: "Then, why don't one of you go out the window and get the key from the door so that you can open it from inside?"; then I would reply "we can't because of the weather" and, again, the weather subject comes in!
Or even if I repeat my joys from the last post about sliding on an icy road, I will inevitably have to explain it with cold weather... This is hopeless!

Why would the weather be like this on a place where it's supposed to be sunny 80% of the year? And no snow, even!! As I said in a previous post, I either want it to snow, or to observe, not exactly the rest in between...
Oh well, yesterday's forecasts pointed at the weather improving in the weekend.. Let's see if it stars improving tomorrow!

Slippery dawn of (2009/01/08)

As odd as it may seem, I stood up all night inside the MONS doing all sort of stuff, even though bad weather was all around. The MONS is separated from our house, Casa Solar, by 9% less than 100 meters of a not very steep road. Our house should be possibly some 6 or so meters higher. The steepest part of that road should climb less than 5m in 50m length.
Of course, the weather during the night was very cold! And it left all reasonably flat surfaces with a thin layer of ice!
I left the MONS only at 7:55. and I think I got home sometime before 8:30.. Meanwhile I had had some problems in climbing that road! Once I found out it was fun, I returned to MONS to get my camera, and made this 3-minute fun video!
You can turn on English subtitles, by pressing the button next to the audio volume and choosing to display them. They have a few extra comments!..

This also illustrates you should be careful when walking at 2400m (It is safer and easier to go by the gravel paths), and also when driving! Falling on hard tarmac is arguably fun, but crashing your car is definitively not so!

Day #24 (2009/01/07) Another shopping day..

The day started with the 11 o'clock sunlight diffusely sneaking by the shutters into our room. Dim as it was, there was no clear perception if it was sunny or cloudy outside. In fact, it was sort of cloudy and foggy, but with some sun in the mixture.. The weather thus was shaken, but not stirred.. This undefined weather lasted for quite some time, but slowly evolved in the "apparently better" direction, yet still being colder than yesterday.. Unconvinced of rapid weather improvements we decided to go "down-town" (to our favorite HiperDino supermarket at La Esperanza) to shop for supplies.

Supplies at HiperDino are all sort of good food goods! But we had another objective in mind that could not be satisfied in La Esperanza. We asked the guy at the counter for a "tienda de herramientas" and he quickly replied that there were no "ferreterias" in La Esperanza (this is how we learn new words in spanish!), and that we should go to La Laguna, to some specific store which I now forgot its name.. Regardless, we ended up in Leroy Merlin, which for sure had what we wanted!
We wanted to find extra tools that we were missing, namely something that would cut things, among other useful stuff!

As for the night, humidity was high first, then the wind was high too.. Still, unexpectedly, we had visits again! They had booked the plateau near MONS for observations, but were logically not going to observe anything due to improper weather.. So I invited them inside the MONS, showed them around the dome, where some had already been.
A few hours after they left, there was a time when the sky cleared and we could perhaps open the dome, but since the weather was varying rather rapidly, we decided not to. 30 minutes later there was more wind, and later humidity rose again.. Forecasts say maybe next green light may come only on Saturday... What bad weather we are having!

Day #23 (2009/01/06) Brrr....

No, it did snow yesterday...
Today the day was spent inside the house most of the time. With the exception of a Delicious lunch of Rancho Canario and Sollomillo de Cerdo con salsa de guayaba at the observatory's residency.
(hmm, so far I have not said much about the food there.. It deserves a post! Soon, perhaps)
Well, other than staying at home watching some good archived TV series on the portuguese television RTP website, we also solved a few setbacks.. We took a few flats for the last data we had collected, so that we could upload it to the server in a "complete package".. We set up a remote desktop connection to the laptop, so that we could stay at home during bad weather and control the slow upload process.. The catalog of objects we use for was updated with useful info for finding targets.. The log of what we did so far was tweeked with a graphical map of when all targets were observed.. I thought a bit on how to increase the height of some wheeled ladder so that a person can peek through the finder with the telescope pointing very low, and its implications on how we make flats.. And I will now look into an alternative method of pointing a telescope without using the finder at the "impossibly high" position.


Oh well, but our desired snow is unlikely to come. However, temperature is really cold, and the car was already covered in ice a while ago! These graphs plot humidity, wind speed, and temperature over here.. the temperature graph is white when the Celcius degrees go below zero.. Let's wait until morning to see what we have outside!

Night #22 (2009/01/05) Will it snow?

The day started clear and promising, but two or three hours after we woke up after last night (at 15:30 to be precise) clouds came honting over the hill, comming between us and the Teide, and then blocking the sun in a cold windy and wet feeling.. I need not say what happened to the humidity value registered at the weather station...

It's now 00:30 and, yes, the humidity is at 100% still. It has rained, wind has blown.. Still no snow!

I have these odd contradicting wishes: I want to stay up at night to measure spectra of stars.. But I also what it to snow! I want to measure WR6 4 times in a row.. I like white fluffy frozen water.. I want to see the daily evolution of WR 140.. Snow is fun!.. Scopes are fun!..

Oh well, I must find some balance between my opinions.. Maybe I should say: Let it snow when I'm tired... And I don't need it to snow everyday.. It could snow heavily once, and stay cold and dry with little to keep the snow around and allow us to observe :) Or, why not snow during the day and stay clear and warm at night? Hmm, I don't need snow at night, it could melt as long as new snow would appear when I'd wake up..
I better not think too much on this, or I will either turn into a meteorologist, or a failed weather engineer..

100% humidity, 0.5ºC, wind is NW 56km/h.. So will it snow tonight?

Night #21 (2009/01/04) A windy frustration

This was our third consecutive night of observation this year!
This is particularly great because we observed WR 6 in all these three nights. WR 6 is a WR star that has a rotation period of 3.76 days. Observing it during the complete period is a very nice thing. Lets hope tomorrow we make a fourth measurement, and then we will have observations for around the period.
This night, however, did not finish at 6:00 in the morning.. At around 21:00 wind speed was near 30km/h and it started to rise slowly but consistently (plus or minus a few km/h).. At 2:00 it reached a peak of 45km/h. Inside the dome almost nothing was felt, just a very cold light breeze.

Information on wind speed comes from two weather stations located at the top of the same hill that shields our observatory from the NNW wind...

We kept the dome open as the wind dropped sligthly, but before 4:00 it jumped to 49 km/h. Since we were a bit tired and the dome was not ours, we could not justify keeping it open, despite the light breeze that was effectively (not) influencing the dome. Consequently we closed the dome and waited a bit while leaving the CCD doing calibration images.
Around 5:00, the wind shyly started dropping below the 45km/h limit, but we could not guess it would really keep below it for the rest of the night. We ended it there, and did not look at the final stars of the night.

This situation is a bit frustrating because the weather station information must be our offitial weather information for deciding when to open or close the dome. Still, the weather station is placed on a location that is important for other higher telescopes, but when the wind comes from NNW the wind does not affet us much. If that dome were mine, more stars would have been measured!...

ASE (Altitude Surströmming Effect)!

Altitude Surströmming Effect (ASE) is a subtle, yet concrete, problem induced by altitude that affects mostly all packaged food goods. Its effects on cleanness of wearable garnishments can be devastating!

Surströmming is a Swedish canned delicacy, usually served on tunnbröd paper-like bread, made from the most refined fermentation of the best herrings on the Baltic Sea. The wonderfully flavored herring is fished when at its peak of flavor in spring, as days become longer under the unbuttoning eyes of the beautiful white and yellow Mosippas (Anemone Puslatilla Vernalis).
Swedes have this exotic appetite for a peculiar and refined cuisine.. Like the traditional Easter dish, Gravad Lax (slightly fermented salt-marinated raw salmon with sugar and a hint of dill), Surströmming seems to be one such traditional peculiarity of the vast, varied, and exhuberant sweedish cuisine!..
Anyway, surströmming is not known for only its mere distinctive taste or ordinarily queer aroma. The care needed for unpackaging the canned nutriment contents is also famous! During the months of storage, the fermentation process native to surströmming qualities generally builds up enough pressure inside the can for certain airline companies to ban it in luggage. Safely opening a can of surströmming involves carefully placing a cloth to keep herring parts in obedience to the law of gravity.

So, ASE is, in essence, the effect of difference in pressure caused by the lower outside air pressure induced by the altitude difference. Any normal food packaging bought 2400m below its opening location will behave similarly to surströmming when not carefully opened.
Despite the person expressing its displeasure regarding ASE's splashes when opening the [vanilla pudding / yogurt / canned tuna / meatball can / etc] at 2400m, this effect is usually too quick and no photo could be taken of it in action to ornament this post. So the picture above refers to a confirming scientific experiment that consisted of filling a water bottle with La Izaña Observatory's air, and taking it to our Hotel during Christmas, at approximately 15m above sea level. The air inside the bottle has altitude-sensitive properties that interact with the plastic packaging making it acquire a different shape! This bottle was then taken back to the altitude of 2400m and surprisingly acquired its original shape (after a few documented noisy plastic sounds during the trip).

As a conclusion, it is advised to take preventive anti-spill actions when opening cans or packages at moderately high altitudes.