The Phoenix has landed

About 30 minutes ago NASA Phoenix satellite landed at the north pole of Mars. The preliminary transmissions suggest that everything went according to plan.
My department opened up its doors for a public viewing of the video feed from JPL, so I watched it along with close to 100 others, most of which were general public.
Seeing the anticipation in the faces in the mission control turn to excitement as each phase of the landing passed successfully made me look forward to putting my first instrument on a telescope taking the first spectum. I won't be doing anything quite as complicated as landing something on another planet, but at least I'll be able to see and tweak my toy.
I also felt like I was living a Schrödinger's cat Gedankenexperiment. The light travel time from Mars to Earth is 15 minutes. So while we were hearing that "Phoenix has just entered the atmosphere" or "at an altitude of 30 meters above the surface", it all happened 15 minutes ago. There's something about realizing that while you anxiously wait to hear the results of the parachute deployment, the spacecraft has either already landed successfully or crashed.

In other news I biked 26 miles today, nine of them were hill climbing. The moral of today is that I have a lot of work to do before riding three days of RAGBRAI. And most of that work will be done in the Bay Area. I'm leaving next Tuesday (June 3) and returning August 7th. I'm starting to get excited about it.

Oh my, oh my, oh May

It has been a long five or so weeks since my last post.
Spring arrived, Aaron visited for a long weekend, spring decided that it in fact came too soon, the end of the semester approached, then the end of the semester arrived, and then drug on for weeks. Andy graduated and then Katie graduated.
As of yesterday morning I'm officially done with the semester and into Summer. And of course it's complicated. There's a Berkeley grad student who wants to help me build my...err...a new spectrometer for Arecibo. I'll spare you all the details, but the consequence of this is I get/have to spend the summer in Berkeley. Get to because a summer in Berkeley would be fun and we'd together make more progress than I would alone. Have to because if I don't move out there soon, they'll build my...I mean the spectrometer without me and I don't get to spend the summer in Ithaca. This prospect is painful since the beautiful summers are what gets us through Ithaca winters (that and the amazing Fall colors). Summers in the Bay Area are probably nice too, though a bit chilly. At least I'll get some real summer while in Iowa at the end of July.
I'll post again once I know exactly when I head west.