Keck – Page 33 – A Darker View

A Little Snow in the Forecast

It was a gorgeous day when we arrived on the summit. A deep blue sky above brilliant white snow covering the slopes. It was difficult to put much faith in a forecast calling for truly dire weather. I could see nothing to the southwest, the direction this weather was approaching from, just the blue Pacific stretching to the horizon.

Oh yeah… The car is still there. It is a truly sad sight to see, the car halfway down the slope. Rumor had it that a tow truck was to come up today to remove the vehicle, but the car was still on the slope when we left.

Not a bad day, I accomplished everything on my to-do list for the day. Some work in AO to check for any stray light, removing some old servers to make way for a new system, locating and labeling some optical fibers that are already in place for this same system. Everything went well, except the lunch time cribbage game, I lost badly.

The weather was degrading all day, first the clouds loomed overhead, then they descended as a heavy fog while the temperature dropped. It did indeed begin to look like the forecasts might have a bit of truth. The prediction is for heavy snow, as much as 6-10 inches. Not sure if that will materialize, it would be nice, we have not had any real snowfall this winter. I will just have to check the webcams tomorrow morning.

It was beginning to snow when we pulled out.

Postcard from the Summit – Keck 2 Construction

A Video Project

Trying to finish up a new video project for Keck Week. As one would guess, the video features the history of Keck. Looking for material has been a great excuse to dig through the Keck archives. Through the expertise of our staff librarian, Peggi Kamisato, I have pursued hundreds of photos and other material from the history of these great telescopes. Turning page after page of photos albums from the construction of the two telescopes, thumbing through observing log #1 to read the notes from those first nights of science observations. I have a new appreciation for the history of this place.

Not all of this material can make it into the video. Some of the best can, hopefully resulting in a worthwhile result. Just a teaser for today, one of the photos from construction that did not make the cut. What about the video? Come to Keck Week and see the premiere!

Keck 1 Construction 1987 — Construction of the Keck 1 Telescope circa 1987, photo by Tom Wynne

Employment Opportunity at Keck – Electronics Engineer

W. M. Keck Observatory position announcement…

Fisheye Keck 1 — The Keck 1 Telescope awaiting lights out and release for the night

W. M. Keck Observatory has an immediate opening for an Electronics Engineer to design and implement major upgrades to the various telescope control systems, add new capabilities and integrate state of the art instruments.

Responsibilities

Provide electronic engineering expertise to support upgrades and new development projects
Participate in system level specifications, develop hardware specifications, interface control documents, and lifecycle design documents
Write, analyze and document test plans, conduct design tests and evaluate results
Generate and maintain production documentation, including schematics, wire diagrams, assembly drawings, data sheets, manuals, and project notebooks
Support project managers by providing and maintaining accurate cost and labor estimates and Bills of Material. Help to maintain project plans through good communication
Coordinate the electronic interfacing of new instrumentation;
Direct the efforts of associate engineers and technicians, coordinate and schedule engineering activities
Assist in the investigation of chronic performance and reliability problems in existing systems and develop and implement solutions to resolve these problems.

Qualifications

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering or equivalent
Three or more years of applicable work experience, preferably in a team environment
Working knowledge of AC and DC electronics theory
Experience in analog and digital electronics, computer interface electronics, and real-time control systems
Understanding of grounding, shielding, and electrical safety
Experience with schematic capture, PCB design and layout
Experience in the design, debug, simulation and validation of electronic circuits and products
Skilled user of test and analysis equipment including oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, bus analyzers, cable and fiber optic test equipment, power measuring equipment, and signal generators
Experience planning and implementing PLC based solutions including I/O selection, communication and programming (Rockwell/AB ControlLogix and RSLogix); experience with National Instruments RIO and LabVIEW FPGA; use of PADS, E3 Wireworks (Zuken), SolidWorks; and experience with programmable multiple axes motion controllers such as DeltaTau PMAC or Galil would be a plus

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates the largest, most scientifically productive telescopes on Earth. The two, 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Island of Hawaii feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and a world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics system. The Observatory is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.

To learn more about this position and to apply, go to: www.keckobservatory.iapplicants.com

Equal Opportunity Employer

Setting Up

Climbing the Stairs

Wait! What is broken?!?

The elevator.

It has been broken for two days. The contractor is here to fix it, but this is the day Olivier and I need to get a job done in AO. It would have to be the Keck 2 elevator, not the Keck 1 elevator. Which telescope are we working in today? Keck 2 of course.

This will mean climbing the stairs to the Nasmyth deck, all five flights of stairs. Five flights does not sound too bad, until you remember that the bottom of these particular stairs start at 13,600ft above sea level. Climbing these stairs is guaranteed to get your heart pumping and remind you of the consequences of every one of those 13,600ft.

The job? Re-installing one of the mirrors in the rotator that was re-aluminized earlier in the week. A delicate, fiddly job that would take much of the day. There will, of course, be missing parts, needed tools, or other small things that we will have to get during the course of the job. Things that are at the bottom of those stairs.

Every trip up and down would be planned, this is not the time to remember that you also needed an #8-32 nut, after the climb. No forgotten items, everything thought through twice. We got the job done, a critical bit of optics safely secured back in the mount and correctly aligned.

In the end I only had to climb the stairs five times through the day.

That was quite enough, thank you.

</rant>

Testing TBAD with UAVSAR

So we have a system that will detect aircraft and shutter the laser.

First Target of the Night — The Keck 2 laser acquires the first target of the night with the glow of sunset behind

It works… We think.

In theory TBAD will detect the TCAS transponder on an aircraft, turning off our AO Laser to avoid illuminating the aircraft. This work via means of a directional antenna mounted to the front of the telescope that is able to detect the 1090MHz TCAS transmissions from the aircraft. The system has been operational for the better part of a year, mounted to the Keck 2 telescope. It operates all the time, whether or not we are using the laser.

The problem is that there is very little air traffic over the summit, it is even more rare that a plane goes directly in front of the telescope while we are observing. It is these test cases we need to prove the system, an aircraft passing through where the laser would be. Though the first year of running the system we logged a total of one detection that would have resulted in a laser shutter event. We need more test cases if we are to prove to the FAA that the system works as designed.

Continue reading “Testing TBAD with UAVSAR”

Black Holes and the Fate of the Universe

This is a recoding of a Keck Observatory Astronomy Talk given by Dr. Günter Hasinger, Astronomer and Director of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. His talk, ‘Black Holes ad the Fate of the Universe’, was given on November 20, 2012 at the Gates Performing Arts Center at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, part of the W. M. Keck Observatory public lecture series.

It’s a little bit of the story of the Universe from beginning to end,” said Dr. Hasinger. “What role do black holes have on the fate of the universe, what are they, and how we can understand them better?”

Günter Hasinger from Keck Observatory on Vimeo.

Surprise: Earth-sized Planets Are Common

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

A team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Hawaii at Manoa has found that 17 percent of all sun-like stars have planets one to two times the diameter of Earth in close orbits. The finding, based on an analysis of the first three years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission and the W. W. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, was announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California this week.

While other studies had shown that planets around stars are common in our galaxy, until this study, it remained unclear if this is true for Earth-size planets.

Exoplanet Census — The fraction of sun-like stars having planets of different sizes, orbiting within one-fourth of the Earth-sun distance (0.25 AU) of the host star. Image credit: Erik Petigura, Geoff Marcy, Andrew Howard,

The team consists of UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Andrew Howard, now on the faculty of the UH Manoa Institute for Astronomy, and UC Berkeley professor Geoff Marcy.

To find planets, the Kepler space telescope repeatedly images 150,000 stars in a small region of the sky. It looks for a tiny dip in each star’s brightness that indicates a planet is passing in front of it, much like Venus passed between Earth and the sun last summer.

We took a census of the planets detected by the Kepler Space Telescope,” said Howard. “Erik Petigura wrote a new pipeline to detect the shallow dimmings of Earth-size planets in Kepler photometry. With his efficient and well-calibrated pipeline we could confidently report the size distribution of close-in planets down to Earth-size. The result is that Earth-size planets are just a common as planets twice Earth size. Remarkable.”

Continue reading “Surprise: Earth-sized Planets Are Common”

Employment at Keck – Adaptive Optics Specialist

The W. M. Keck Observatory operates the world’s two largest optical/infrared telescopes located on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Both telescopes are equipped with AO systems which are routinely used in both Natural and Laser Guide Star (LGS) AO modes. These systems have been extremely productive scientifically. New, more capable, systems are currently in design and development including the implementation of a new laser, new laser launch telescope, near-infrared tip-tilt sensor and a facility to provide simultaneous AO-corrected point spread function estimates to support science data reduction.

AO Bench Work — Working on the Keck 1 AO bench

The AO Specialist will be expected to play a lead role in all phases of the development of new AO capabilities from the concept phase through the design and development, commissioning and handover to operations; as well as in the characterization, optimization and improvement of the existing AO systems. The Specialist will also be expected to help guide the development of the Observatory’s high angular resolution capabilities.
The AO Scientist will also participate in improvements to the existing AO facilities including performance optimization and characterization.

Minimum requirements for this position include: Ph.D. level degree in adaptive optics or high angular resolution astronomy or equivalent experience; three years of relevant experience in the development and/or use of AO for astronomical research; two years of work experience in instrumentation development or operations; a broad understanding of the multiple engineering disciplines needed to develop AO systems; and experience in data visualization and analysis. Desirable qualifications include: a proven track record in the development or optimization of AO systems for astronomy; demonstrated leadership skills; optical, mechanical and controls design and engineering expertise; expertise in the development of the high level software needed to operate and optimize AO systems; and previous Observatory experience.

The following skills are required: Excellent written and oral English communication skills, ability to work independently and as part of a team, strong project and time management skills; ability to set priorities and meet deadlines with flexibility.

This position requires you to submit your resume on-line at: http://keckobservatory.iapplicants.com/ViewJob-324991.html with your cover letter that states why you are uniquely qualified for the position.

Additional information about WMKO and this position may be found on our web site at www.keckobservatory.org