Summer 2002: I am working at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Arecibo is the home of a very large radio telescope and a small group of scientists and staff. The telescope is not actually in the town of Arecibo, but is a half hour drive away down bendy mountain roads. It is there because before there was a telescope, there was a conveniently shaped hole. The observatory has a control room, an office building, a cafeteria, a visitor's center, and Visiting Scientists' Quarters. I am living in the VSQ, which consists primarily of wooden cabins on a hill. I share one of them with Rebecca, another summer student. We have a bedroom with two beds, a small kitchen, a bathroom, and a porch which is an excellent place to watch thunderstorms (a frequent afternoon occurrence here). Andrew and Daniel live in a nearby cabin. Samantha, Martha, Laura, Danielle, and Julia live in a bigger cabin farther up the hill. They have a living room, and it was there that Jodie Foster was filmed in Contact. Every day we have to walk down a lot of stairs to go to work. There are many lizards, snails, and toads to keep us company.
The telescope consists of a 305-meter dish and a platform suspended from three towers. Radio waves from the dish are reflected into the Gregorian dome on the platform, which contains the secondary and tertiary dishes. From these dishes the radio waves enter receivers, and the signals are carried through wires to the receiver room, where they are processed. The telescope is controlled by operators and scientists sitting in the control room. All of the summer students got to ride a cable car up to the platform, and we walked back on the catwalk that connects the platform to a nearby hill. See pictures. We also were allowed to go underneath the dish; see pictures. For more information about the telescope and its history, click here.
Puerto Rico often has hurricanes, which may cause the operators of this impressive telescope to worry. They disconnect the cables that tie the platform to the ground, and let it swing from the three towers that hold it up. It is supposedly safe in winds up to 125 mph. To check how fast the winds actually are, one of my advisors for the summer built a wind speed monitor. One of my jobs is to make a graphical user interface (gui) that allows people to view the wind speed and direction over time. I am writing code in Tcl/Tk with the BLT package.
In addition to my computer project, I have done some observing with the telescope. The control room has a big window that looks out over the telescope. I use the computer to point the secondary telescope dish so that it picks up the area of the sky I want to look at, and then tell it which receiver to use and for how long I want to collect data. I can then make graphs and see exciting radio features of objects in outer space.
Some scientists here use lidar (like radar but higher frequency) to measure the temperature of the atmosphere, among other things. It looks like a huge green lightsaber extending up into the sky. See here for a picture of lidar elsewhere and a description. Science is cool.
