Greetings from the desert

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

Hey, everybody,

We're making great progress getting the telescope ready to go.  Now our biggest
problem is that a key component that was advertised as being able to function
under 220 V power doesn't actually seem able to do so, and we have several
shipments of replacement and supplementary parts that are being held up in
customs.  Still, we managed to take a picture the other night.  You can see it
at www.rotse.net/temp/cena.jpg

It's a huge elliptical galaxy about ten million light years away from us, so
the light you see in the picture left that galaxy ten million years ago.  It
looks fuzzy because at that distance, the hundreds of billions of stars in that
galaxy just look like a bright smear.  The dark band is thick obscuring dust
left over from a spiral galaxy that was eaten by this galaxy millions of years
previously.  The picture is slightly out of focus, and the ccd camera is
running hot (that key component I mentioned earlier?  It cools off the
camera.), so it's very noisy, but it still looks pretty good.

I also put a bunch of pictures of Namibia at www.rotse.net/dasmith/photos You
can see the desert, the mountains, the observatory, and other things I've seen
on my adventure so far.  Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me this
morning, or you could have seen the herd (flock?) of ostriches we saw on the
drive to the observatory.  The wildlife has just been spectacular.  Warthogs,
baboons, meercats, springbok, and kudu, among other things.  Not *every* day,
but just about every other day, I see something stunning.  Well, the scenery is
stunning every day.  Luckily no black mambas yet, although I'm told they do
live around here.  And apparently a few days before we got here they found two
baby yellow cobras in the control center.  That was reassuring, as you might
guess.

You know, I never heard of this practice of squeezing pop bottles to make them
last longer, or whatever.  Not sure what the physics of it is.  Never occured
to me to do that, and I never knew anyone that did.

Gotta go,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                http://www.rotse.net/dasmith/

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