Hi All,

As you might recall, we were weathered out last January and so I’ve come back to 1) find my champagne bottle and 2) measure CO gas in merging spirals. The weather has been pretty good so far and in the first two nights we got 9 good detections. I would send pictures of what’s happening here but I forgot my camera cable, so all I can do is send an image of one of our detections. I’ll update you soon!

Good CO Detection

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 Two recent things:

1) Owing to the poor weather, we’ve had to put in another application to the 30m dish this summer. I shall be sure to track down the fox’s lair with the snow gone in search of my lost champagne. We’ve also submitted a sample of spiral-spiral mergers to be viewed by the William Hershel Telescope on the Canary Islands as part of a ‘Do spirals survive mergers’ project. Should lead to some stunning images if succesful.

2) The original merger paper got split into two because there was so much in it! These were recently placed on Astroph for the whole scientific community to see. You can find them here and here here.

Hopefully the referee will give the go ahead soon for their full publication in the journal MNRAS. We’ll keep you posted!

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I am halfway through our penultimate night and, as expected, the weather is still poor though much better than the previous night. In total it left about 2-3 feet of snow (Pic A) and for most of the day it looked as though the telescope would remain non-operational. Lots of ice had collected on the dish and the receivers. After about an hour into our scheduled run though, there was a short spell when the stars came out and the satellite images suggested the cloudy front had finally passed. The first thing needed was for the operator to get on the raised platform and knock off all the ice from the receiver (Pic B). They also heated the dish to melt the ice though this meant that our calibrations would be off for a while since the receivers basically work by measuring temperature differences. Anyhow, we got underway with some Blue Elliptical galaxies a bit later and I thought that things would pick up quickly. Unfortunately, more cloud soon moved in and it was very hard to get a good signal. I had to resort to pointing at Saturn for readings which is not ideal because Saturn is large compared with our beam and so its not great at calibrating the exact centre of the direction in which the telescope points. In any case, by the time we were taking readings it started snowing again and we had to shut down. Hopefully it will have cleared up by day break and we can get a few good readings in. I also managed to get a picture of Senor Zorro with the flash at a distance. If this isn’t the epitome of evil, then I’m not sure what is (Pic C)!

Pictures: (A) Snow, (B) Icicles and (C) Evil.

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The bad weather continues to badden. The telescope has now been down for about 36 hours and the first night of the blue ellipticals project has saddly gone to waste. There is atleast a foot of snow now and the dish is covered in icicles (pictured). The forecast isn’t good for tomorrow either so our best hope for results will probably be in the 5-hour stretch just before we finish on Monday!

In other news, Senor Zorro came back last night, pining at the window for more of my hard earned champagne! I thought I better include this picture as it brings out the evil in his eyes.

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We’re almost 30 hours into our observing run to examine “Molecular Gas in Merging Spirals” and virtually the whole time we’ve been shut down due to weather! Tonight we’re expecting 3cm of snow which is great news for the skiers (who seem to be enjoying perfect blue skies during the day) but disastrous for detecting CO gas from galaxies. IRAM can see through some cloud, but when the air is completely saturated with water there is no possibility of getting a clean signal. The most exciting thing to happen so far occurred last night (New Years Eve) when I left a small bottle of champagne outside in the snow to chill it for midnight GMT. When I went out to fetch it though, I found it had disappeared with a set of fox prints leading up to and then away from it! Tonight at dinner the fox (”Zorro” in Spanish) came by the dining room looking for food (the IRAM staff treat them as pets and feed them often) though I reckon it was after more of my champagne. (Pictures to follow soon - I forgot my USB cable).

Since tonight was the last night we were scheduled for the mergers, we’ll have to reapply to come back later on this year! Tomorrow we shift projects to the Blue Ellipticals thought the forecast isn’t good so we’ll probably be seeing more of IRAM soon. Great start to 2009! (Next time I’m here I’m bringing a foxhound).

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Update: Pictures of the Fox, and snow on the dish:

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