My last night in Tokyo I wound up at dinner with Yuka, Yuki, Yumi, and Salvador (spot the outlier) at my favorite restaurant that Yuki found: 野菜の王様, King of Vegetables, in Hibiya.  We’d visited the other location in January, and I was so excited to see vegetables that we went again.

They had this one vegetable I’d never seen before: barafu, or ice plant, notably coated in tiny pearls of water that feel gelatinous to the touch.  This isn’t your California invasive ice plant, but a salty, edible leafy green of African origin.  Like other desert plants, barafu takes in carbon dioxide at night, storing it as malic acid, then in daylight uses the malic acid for its photosynthesis (source).

I loved the taste and the texture of barafu, and I piled it liberally in my glass for vegetables from the salad bar.

In addition to our salads, the restaurant brought vegetables that we cooked in a recessed pot full of broth at our table.  All the rage in Tokyo these days is adding collagen to the broth, so we opted for that options.  Desserts were crafted out of vegetables as well.  ごちそうさま！

One morning I made Hitomi-san, my gracious host, breakfast with radish sprouts, an omlette, and strawberries.  いただきます！

Vending machines are everywhere: train stations, on the side of the street.  I’m always on the lookout for drinks that aren’t Pocari Sweat, so I tried this “salt & litchi” one that was quite good, without being too sweet or salty.

After leaving Kappabashi, the Kitchen Town, my next stop was to get a Japanese Android phone for a friend’s startup.  I headed to the electronics district, the center of all things with circuit boards in Tokyo, where a sign warned about “upskirting”.  Good thing I was wearing jeans.  Moving on…

Disembarking at the Akihabara station, a JR employee was loading a number of JR-branded futon onto a cart.  これらは布団JRのです？  はい、JRのです。  Well then.  Moving on…

I was in Akihabara, the electronics town. Clothes and Bollywood DVDs from India, novelties, op amps, anything small and metal, you name it, they sell it.

Capacitors, fasteners, plugs, wire, cable ties, tools, bolts, capacitors, fuses, ammeters, and pantyhose.  Maro-san took me here during my first weekend in Tokyo in 2011, but I didn’t bring my camera.  The shops were crammed into this maze of low passageways in a building, dark in the center but glowing with hundreds of multicolored LEDs.  Outside this heart of Akihabara, skyscrapers pulshed a host of bright billboards advertising video games, slicker electronics ranging from ricemakers to USB hubs, video games, maid cafes, and anything an otaku could desire.

Refurbished Android phone acquired in a shop with cables a tenth the price of what they were at Softbank, I hustled toward the airport.

At Akihabara station, a small farmers market was set up selling beautiful vegetables and produce for reasonable prices… from ふくしま as it says on the banner or 福島県 or Fukushima Prefecture. That Fukushima Prefecture was undergoing some rebranding.  After being told for all of summer 2011 to not eat food from that region, whether fish or vegetables, I was apprehensive.  But for this much effort, perhaps the food was safe, over a year later?  Fukushima-ken is a large area, and maybe the southern part of the prefecture has safe food?  How much food had I eaten from Fukushima-ken in the two-plus months I’d been in Japan to date?  Had it been safe?  I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life worrying about 放射能 or hoshano, radioactivity harming my food, so I pressed west and south toward the airport.

Next stop: Tokyo Station to hop on the express to the airport.  One required stop was the shop selling souvenirs depicting the mascot on your subway card, Suica’s Penguin.  There was penguin candy, cards, notebooks, cloths, stickers, and even an apron for sale.

Here I am in January of 2012 with Suica’s penguin at the same store.  Penguin and I were both bundled up against the cold!

I arrived at the airport, intending to buy bags of souvenir candy and snacks for friends back home.  Photographs, souvenirs, and assignments all complete, I could relax a bit and enjoy endless gifts and chocolate. To my absolute delight, a group of cultural ambassadors stood, fitting departing tourists for kimono.  I waited in line and watched as couples were tied into the intricate knots and garments, still worn for celebrations.

This gaijin, with her wide feet, had a hard time fitting into the narrow geta sandals, but being tied into a kimono was a great way to say sayonara to the country I’d visited three times in 10 months and come to love.  I’m not sure when I’ll go back, but I hope it’s soon, and with a stronger command of Japanese under the obi sash of my metaphorical kimono.  ありがとうございました。

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My last day in Tokyo dawned hot and dry.  I thanked my generous host Hitomi profusely and headed out for some errands.  I stashed my bags in a coin locker at a central station and headed out for Kappabashi, known as “Kitchen Town” for its profusion of shops for restaurants and kitchens.  I was on a mission for my friend Andy to find him a knife.

First I encountered the shop selling steel implements, strainers and funnels.

Steel containers of every conceivable size and shape.  There was a particular restaurant supply shop in Boston, but here were dozens of shops along a single street, all selling different things!  Some had a larger variety of inventory than others, but most specialized.

Cookie cutters in all shapes, but very expensive.

One shop had put out its trash in the bright morning for collection.  This was the first “mess” I’d seen in Tokyo proper, bins and other containers stacked by a shrubbery.

Some shops reminded me of the dark, cramped stalls in the Old City of Jerusalem where I expected to find Aladdin’s lamp.  Selling a hodgepodge of things, ranging from giant pots to Buddha heads to highly specialized machines, you could find anything for your restaurant or kitchen in Kappabashi.

I loved the cookie cutters: seahorses, feet, knights, starfish, handprints, telephones, lighthouses… displayed next to flasks.

Kappabashi is famous for its サンプル, or plastic samples of food.  The industry is worth billions of yen a year, and some restaurants may order millions of yen worth of samples to display outside of their restaurant.  The plastic samples are very helpful to illiterate gaigin who would like some idea about what the food will be before ordering.  The tiny plastic samples above in keychain or magnet form were hundreds of yen each, easily costing $10 or more dollars for something that would fit in your pocket.  Handcrafted out of  polyvinyl chloride, each slice of watermelon or octopus tentacle could pass for a real piece of food.

The larger samples of complete meals were stunning.  What sort of artisans make these plates?  How do they color them?  What are the processes like?

I thought about bringing home a box of sashimi samples, but at $50 I couldn’t afford it.  Quickly running out of 円, I had to focus on my plight of finding Andy a knife.

Don’t forget the beer, frosted in plastic ice.

Other shops sold tablecloths, napkins, window curtains, chopsticks, spoons, and everything else imaginable for the kitchen.  I could have spent days and my entire income from 2012 there.

Some of the shop owners did not allow photographs, especially at the store selling noren, or curtains.  I asked around at the shops with owners who allowed photographs, and they recommended a particular knife store.  The owner allowed and encouraged photographs, and spoke English to boot.  He had beautiful knives made of layered steel.

Some of the eel and fish knives were in the hundreds if not approaching thousands of dollars.  I picked the most beautiful knife that could be used for vegetables and fish, thanked the owner, and headed on my way.  (When reimbursing me, Andy would pick out the precise moment of the transaction based on the receipt to decide the exchange rate.)

If you find yourself in Kappabashi, buy your knives from the Kamata store.

The last store I visited sold ceramics.  I could have brought back an entire suitcase of their bowls and cups, but resisted.  My favorite was a Daruma cup with a lid, the monk who meditated for so long that his arms and legs fell off.

As I hightailed it back to the train station, I passed a number of stores selling funeral supplies, shrines and caskets for ashes.  The juxtaposition of fake food with death indicated something about the impermanence of existence and whether this is all real.  I didn’t stop long enough to contemplate the metaphysics of the situation and hopped on a train to run the last errands before the airport.

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The National Science Foundation requires that you include on some proposals the names of all of your coauthors from the last several years, as well as their institutions.  If you have more than a handful of coauthors, or are on publications with legions of coauthors, this task becomes difficult, and quickly!  Fortunately, as Leo Stein pointed out, ADS makes this process easy and even pleasant.

First, start an abstract search in ADS.  I’ll look up my fairy god-astronomer‘s coauthors, because they’re bound to be good folks.

Under Filters we’ll select only refereed articles, because we don’t want every last DPS and LPSC abstract.  For an actual NSF proposal, you want all bibliographic sources, as you don’t want a collaborator from a published conference paper being on the panel that judges your work.

We have a list of 68 abstracts!  Let’s go to the bottom of the page.

After the final abstract, we can select all records, or choose individual records for which to look up coauthor information.

Further down on the retrieved articles page, there’s an option to “Get Author-Affiliation form for selected articles”.

On the Author-Affiliation service page, you can select specific coauthors, and choose their current institution or affiliation, then finally export the whole kit and caboodle to a comma-separated text file (CSV), an Excel file (.xls), text, or to your browser.

Submit your NSF proposal, smile, then spend the time you saved to do some actual science.

I was first introduced to ADS in 2006 by Chi “Teddy” C. Cheung, and it’s been an indispensable companion since as I try to dig my way through a mountain of astronomical literature.  Export all of the references you want to BibTeX or Endnote format?  Keep a library of papers?  Find out if your friends have been publishing lately?  Massage your toes?  ADS does all of that, and more.  I am tremendously grateful for the grants that enable ADS to continue running and providing these services to our communities.

What is your favorite ADS trick or feature?  Feel free to share in the comments.

Dan-chan, graduate student in forestry who does research in the jungles of Malaysia and Borneo and intrepid Fuji-san climbing guide, met me at the train station in Sendai.  Who was this samurai with the horned helmet who appeared everywhere in the region?

Date-san appeared on all the train station signs in cartoon form as a rice ball, onigiri, with horns; here he was at Matsushima.

Dan-chan took me on a bus up the hill past Tōhoku University where she studies.

NICHe: New Industry Creation Hatchery Center, a business incubator.

Date-san on a horse, impressed on a fence.

We arrived at a torii guarding the entrance to Sendai Castle, home of Date-san.

Zunda, almost as omnipresent in Tōhoku as Date-san.

Prayer blocks to hang on the fence, including good wishes for Tōhoku.

Daruma fortunes.

Animatronic lion fortunes; startling!

In memorial (notice the photographer?).

Finally, we met the statue of Date-san aside his horse.

Campaigning at age 14, Date-san took power from his father three years later, assuming the role of daimyō, 大名, “big name”, lord of the territory.  He lost sight his right eye to smallpox in childhood, though whether it was removed later by him or one of his vassals remains unclear.  Joseph Campbell wouldn’t be surprised at the similarity of this story to other myths: humans have a propensity toward the structure of these stories like this, common across cultures.  During a series of land disputes Date-san’s father was kidnapped by a neighboring clan; as part of the rescue, his father demanded Date-san kill all the enemies, resulting in the father’s death as well.  In a power struggle with his mother, he poisoned his brother and his mother fled.

Date-san improved the city of Sendai, turning the formerly small fishing village into a prosperous city.  The Tōhoku Region was generally seen as a backwater, a remote area full of fishermen to the north.  Date-san expanded trade and even sent a Western-style ship with an embassy of almost 200 people to Rome, visiting even Mexico and Spain en route.  In a time when Christians were persecuted in Japan, Date-san was tolerant and even supportive of foreigners and their religious ideas.  A few Japanese on the expedition stayed in Spain, their descents remaining to this day.

Dan-chan and I looked out over the city of Sendai, the cloudy haze preventing us from seeing the sea or far inland.

On the far hill is one of the largest statues in the world, the Sendai Daikannon, 仙台大観音, a depiction of the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion or the godess of mercy.  Even though she’s 100 meters tall, she was too far away to photograph property.

Sendai toward the Pacific.

Both of us under Date-san.

Carry on, Northeastern Japan!  Thousands of cranes formed columns inside.

We returned on the bus to town and walked to a fish market.  It wasn’t as overwhelming as Tsukiji, but the variety of fish was still delightful.

ほや, or sea pineapple.  Dan-chan had to convince me this was a sea creature and not a plant.

Sea urchin, うに.

Back at the train station, there were loads of zunda souvenirs.

And Date-san rendered in cute keychain form!  かわいいね！  (Though the beef tongues… maybe a little 怖い.)

I tried zunda mochi ice cream for a snack.

Waiting for my train I watched the conductor timing the exit of his Shinkansen from the train station.  がんばろう日本!  がんばろう東北!  Carry on, Japan; carry on, Northeastern Region!

The train pulled out into the gathering night for points south; mine followed shortly, taking me south toward Tōkyo.

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I left the islands of Matsushima and turned inland to the town, Matsushima-kaigan (松島海岸; pine island shore), home of a Zen Buddhist temple.

With no guidebook and just a map, I decided to take a rambling route back to the train station in search of lunch.

A gate marked the entrance to a wooded area, with a small restaurant on the left, selling oysters and beef tongue, local specialties (郷土料理).

I ordered the local specialties: beef tongue with miso soup and a crab leg (which I used as a straw, unsure if that was rude or not).

And a giant oyster!  I grew up on Tomales Bay oysters, so I was excited to try another mollusk in its hometown.

I left the restaurant and passed through the gate, entering a serene wood of straight cedar trees surrounding Zuiganji (瑞巌寺), a regarded zen temple of the region. Built in the 800′s, the ubiquitous Date-san restored the structure in the 1600′s as a family temple.  Date-san is a recurring character in Miyagi-ken; we’ll return to him later.

Closed for a decade of planned renovations, the main hall and kitchen are Japanese national treasures.  I wandered the woods and looked at statues emerging from caves.

Leaving the woods I walked toward the train station.

Souvenirs in Matsushima were more serious and elegant than any other prefecture I’d visited.

Matsushima and Miyagi-ken were, in addition to beef tongue and oysters, famous for zunda, or ずんだ, sweetened soybeans.

Rather than cutesy cheap plastic ornaments, Matsushima-kaigan sold cloths, wooden mementos, and less flashy sweets.

Funori, also used as an adhesive.

Continuing on, I encountered another small temple.

White and black cats, cousins of Arecibo Observatory’s feline residents?

Back on the road to the train station a sign advertised local seafood, including ほや, hoya, or sea pineapple.

Back at the seashore, I continued toward the train station.

My favorite photo of the trip was about to happen.

Four monks walking on the sidewalk.

Signs for a marine park, with seals, fish, and penguins.

Is it larger on the inside than the outside?

This map detailed the area around Matsushima Bay, as well as local hotsprings, campgrounds, and shrines.  I’d love to come back here with a small boat.

Ferry tour map of the bay.

Welcome to Matsushima.

Back onboard the train, heading toward Sendai to meet Dan-chan.

As we passed boatyards and marinas, I wondered what this looked like in March of 2011, more than 14 months earlier.  Little, if any, evidence remained in Matsushima of the previous year’s disaster.

Off to Sendai…

The media guy here is still getting calls, almost a week later.  Univision came by, Dish Network wanted to interview someone…
 
What are we doing in the midst of all this?  Regularly scheduled observations of asteroid (99942) Apophis, everyone’s favorite potentially hazardous asteroid that we’ve known about for almost nine years now.  None of these recently discovered raucous interlopers for us this week, pshaw.  Even so, the events of last week underscore the importance of “finding them before they find us” and commercial solutions to asteroid problems.

A stony, elongated, near-Earth asteroid about 0.2 miles across (315 meters, or bigger than the Arecibo dish) named after a recurring villain on Stargate (and therefore the Egyptian god of destruction), Apophis generated all sorts of fear and excitement in 2004 when there was some uncertainly regarding whether it’d hit earth or not in the coming decades.
Our co-conspirators at JPL/Goldstone (I toured there in 2009) found in January that Apophis wasn’t going to hit us in either 2029 or 2036… or any time before 2070, for that matter.  So you can sleep well tonight, knowing you’re safe for the foreseeable future from big asteroids that might fly low enough to skim inside satellite orbits but large enough to be detected.  The smaller ones we can’t find before they find us, so duck occasionally and don’t hang out near windows when you hear sonic booms.

We had all sorts of transmitter and receiver problems in the first days of our Apophis observing time: the crowbar circuit wasn’t working (which is a problem at 65,000 volts and 33 amps!), and then the receiver chilling system stopped keeping things cold.  Thus, when Apophis was as close to Arecibo as it was going to get, we couldn’t observe it, until a few nights later when it was too far away to take images.  Ah well.  At least we helped to refine Apophis’s orbit to rule out any future impacts.

If you’ve visited, you know Arecibo is very isolated: 30 minutes up the hill from the nearest grocery store in the Puerto Rican equivalent of a rustbelt town.  Not a lot happening here.

To keep myself occupied at night after sunset at 6:30, I’ve been cooking and baking.  Tonight’s dinner involved things I’ve only seen twice at the grocery store: salmon steaks (baked with lemon and dill) and green beans (!).  If there’s daikon at the grocery store, I nab it: my second gallon of kimchi is now fermenting in the refrigerator with Korean red pepper and fish sauce mailed here by Louis.  With the food processor I bought for about 50% off at Thanksgiving, I’m unstoppable in my galley-sized kitchen.  I chop starfruit, make avocaladas (avocado + piña colada), and perfect pumpkin-based custards.  I pulverize vegetables with eggs for soufflé. Or just cut up vegetables for green “soups”.  It’s something to do at night after dark that doesn’t involve braving terrible roads and worse drivers.

My goodness, it’s full of stars!

Over the weekend I baked two versions of what I’m calling Apophis cake: elongated, battered, thermally processed… but this one hits the spot (womp womp).  A modern take on red velvet cake, perhaps, inspired by Thunder Cake, a childhood favorite.  What’s to be afraid of when you’re eating cake (especially one full of vegetables)?   Use raw beets if you have them and unprocessed, natural cocoa powder so the final batter turns red from reacting with the acids in the yogurt, lemon juice, and apple cider vinegar.  If you’re not into beets, use pumpkin purée or even spinach (!) as the vegetable flavor entirely disappears under the cocoa powder in the baked cake.  Add some fresh ginger in with the beet purée, or some Chinese five spice powder for extra kick.  This is sort of a “kitchen sink” recipe, involving everything in the cupboards, pantry, and refrigerator.

You can halve the recipe to fit into a loaf pan.  Unmodified, this recipe makes about 18 cupcakes and an 8″x8″ cake.

Apophis Cake

recipe modified from here

Ingredients

• 2 cups raw beet purée (about two medium beets run through the grating attachment on your food processor)
• 1 cup melted butter (or coconut oil)
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup blanched almond flour (about 3 oz; could substitute almonds spun in the food processor along with coconut flour for about five minutes… but don’t run too long, you don’t want nut butter!)
• 3/4 cup coconut flour
• 1 cup 100% natural cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 1 cup sweetener (honey, maple syrup, etc. for less overwhelming sweetness; sugar if you have a sweet tooth)
• 2 teaspoons plain yogurt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar (optional; extra acid increases the red color)
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice (optional)

Method

Preheat oven to 350 ˚F.  Mix all ingredients together and pour into cupcake liners, or into a parchment-lined glass baking pan.

Bake at 350 ˚F for 20 minutes for cupcakes; 35 minutes for cake until a fork or toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.  Give it an extra five minutes after that, as this is a very fudge-y, moist batter.  Cover the top with foil if it’s browning too quickly.  Let sit for ten minutes before removing from baking pans onto wire cooling racks, then frost.

Frosting

• 1 cup of cashews
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil or butter
• 3 tablespoons honey or maple syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Soak a cup of cashews in water for at least an hour (before you start the baking process?), then purée with 2 tablespoons coconut oil or butter, 3 tablespoons honey, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, and 1/4 teaspoon salt.  Add Korean blackberry wine if you’re feeling like you need an extra kick.

The antioxidants in the beets will protect against free radical damage in the event of killer asteroid impact, though if you elect to use pumpkin purée the beta-carotene will help your night vision in case the earth is shrouded in dust post-impact.  Ginger helps you digest whatever’s growing in the post-apocalyptic environment.  Coconut oil is a good fat and source of energy, though use butter, palm oil, or whatever’s on hand (medium-chain  triglycerides and omega-3 fatty acids are always a great bet).  And of course, dark chocolate is good for your heart, brain, and mood—plus antioxidants, minerals, and fiber, all things that help when you’re fighting for the survival of your species after the next extinction-level event.

Who would run the Titan sailing expedition?  I suggested myself and nominated Sarah as admiral; an aeronomer offered to be railmeat.  Cracks about how we’d all be “squidbate” went back and forth.  Brian christened our ship “The Calamari”.  Alex designed a mission badge.

Before I knew it, Justin “@UrbanAstroNYC” Starr had turned the whole conversation into a meme.

From @UrbanAstroNYC, “Sondy and friends go sailing on Titan”, with apologizes to Charles Schultz

My grandfather Bill Littlejohn used to animate Peanuts; he would have been 99 this year.  An animator, union organizer, test pilot, and airplane designer, his long and varied career reminds me that it’s okay that mine is taking a variety of twists and turns through technical and creative pursuits.  Bill grew up in a sailing family, and a few of his hand-illustrated birthday cards that he’d mail or fax every year involved sailboats and depictions of me with short brown hair.

Thank you, Grandpa, for all you created and gave; you’re living on as we continue to explore the cosmos.

Arriving at the control room, I sat down with my binder full of… notes on how to observe at Arecibo, which hadn’t made much sense.  At any optical observatory you enter your coördinates into a computer and take an image.  After verifying that you pointed the telescope correctly, you then tell the telescope system to take data for the rest of the night, occasionally adjusting pointing or focus.

At Arecibo, you’re pointed in the right direction.  Alignment with the William E. Gordon Telescope is not an issue.  Even with the 305-meter dish, you’re good to a few millimeters.

Getting the signal out of the receiver and properly into the computer is the hard part of observing.  Instead of a few shiny silvered mirrors and a charge coupled device digitizing and sending your photons to a screen, here a maze of waveguides, cables, and wires brings signals from the matte metal dish, after being ushered into the receivers, along a path 1,600′ long to the control room.  Where computer monitors would display starfields at an optical observatory, wavy lines danced across oscilloscopes at Arecibo.  It felt like junior year electronics laboratory again in the physics department, so different from most of the things we were doing in astronomy, and not just because of cgs/MKS units arguments.

Ellen had considered walking me through cabling the week before our six-night-long marathon observing run, but ultimately decided that it wouldn’t make sense out of context.  Wait for the actual observing run to understand the cabling.

In the overly-air conditioned room the panels of cables with cryptical labels looked daunting.  Mike stepped in, ripped all of them out by the BNC connectors, and handed me a cable.  I idly fingered the BNC connector.

“Everything begins with the Planetary Downcoverter, labeled 7-19 in rack #7.  Split/attenuate the signal from there with 7-3 (opposite sense signal) and 8-3 (same sense signal).  For continuous wave, set to ~40 dB (OC ~41 dB; SC ~47 db as of 2012).  Filter with the Butterworth 125 kHz bandwidth filters, 7-6 and 8-6…”  Somewhat in a state of shock and disbelief I obligingly followed his instructions as I stuck BNC connector after BNC connector into the panels.

Later in the night, Mike proceeded to recable for another asteroid with a different setup.  It was like watching an anime character’s arms in a blur, and a moment or two later, the blur subsided, and lo, things were cabled.

“How long did it take you to learn to do that?”

“About a month.”

After attenuating, splitting, filtering, amplifying, and connecting, the signal winds up on an ancient Sun Sparc Station, of similar vintage to the author, where you type a few commands to begin data taking.  Abstracted away are details of where the asteroid is, how long light takes to travel there, and what sort of data you’re taking (continuous wave, or encoded?).  Type five letters, confirm with the transmitter operator, and bam, you’re sending a million watts of S-band signal off to the asteroid.  It returns a few seconds (or minutes) later and you measure the few parts in a billion of signal that you get in response.

The transmitter is controlled a delightfully archaic display, looking something like an old-school video game housing, with 8-bit graphics and audible alarms when the filaments or thermionic cathodes in the klystrons stop behaving as they ought.

Recable, process, and magically, you get something like this:

We had six nights on the telescope, the first one going until 4 am; subsequent ones going until around 2 am.  After the first few, Mike left early and I finished the runs.  The second-to-last night I tried cabling on my own, but was somewhat foiled by the remnants of the aeronomers’ cabling scheme from earlier in the day.  The last night it became a lot easier.  The transmitter had other ideas, but we have data and can process it.

Observing here is much more about engineering than physics  How can you reconfigure cables and machinery to do your bidding?  Arecibo is much more hands-on than any other place I’ve been: everyone rolls up their sleeves and gets covered in grease several times a week.  While some details are hidden away, the actual process of taking data is much more transparent, and you can visualize the photons through the waveguide and down to the control room.

Some irony: the control room is air conditioned to about 55 ˚F.  So cold that after weeks of wearing nylon hiking pants or shorts and a t-shirt, I was freezing in jeans, closed-toed shoes, socks, a scarf, sweatshirt, and fleece jacket.  Going outside, into the cable car, and up and down 250 stairs to the receiver room to evaluate the instruments was quite warm in comparison.

After the first night, the telescope operator on duty, Norberto (pictured above), asked if I wanted to go up to the platform and uncover the receiver for another experiment.  Sure!  I ditched the fleece and scarf and hopped on board the cable car in the dark.  We waved goodbye to the control room and car housing.  A firefly drifted by below us.

Up on the platform we could see the first quarter moon descending to the west beyond the tower.

Norberto led us into the rotary joint.

Below the joint, looking north.  To the left is the control room; to the right the visitor center.

Down the numerous flights of stairs.

We uncovered ALFA and went back up 200-something stairs to the cable car, back down to the control room, and then I hiked another 125 steps back up to Visiting Scientist Quarters.  Bed at 4:30 am, zzz…  I think I prefer the telescope after dark.

It’s a great view.  Better is the view from the cable car, or the platform itself.  Best is from inside the receiver dome housing.

Weighing around 90,000 pounds, the platform is very stable for being suspended 500 feet in the air.  We took the cable car to tour the structure.

After alighting from the cable car, you walk down a staircase to the “rotary joint”, the hub around which the platform rotates.  Photons/waves come out of the grey box in the upper left.

Climbing through the rotary joint is a bit awkward, but the rest of the trip involves stairs and ladders.

Hello, line feed!

Another few more staircases we were in the dome proper where both transmitters and receivers dwell.

After some dire warnings, we went into the transmitter room where several klystrons stood.  These beasts are what produce our megawatt radar wave, similar to the klystrons at SLAC (though theirs can produce 50 megawatts at about the same frequency).  Signals from the klystrons are focused by the telescope and sent to bounce off asteroids, whether near-Earth or out in the main asteroid belt.

Down another staircase, now to the receivers’ instrument room.

And down another level to the receivers themselves: ”business end” of the telescope.  These strange plates receive the tiny radio signals from galaxies, pulsars, and yes, asteroids.  The largest is about three feet across.  When you’re getting just a few parts in a billion back of your signal, you need all the sensitivity you can get.

At this point you couldn’t go any lower without falling out of the dome, or into the tertiary mirror, below.

Looming over us as we emerged from the receiver and transmitter rooms was the 8 o’clock tower.

The 16-meter dish toward the Atlantic.

We just missed the 10 o’clock cable car down to the control room, but we opted to take the catwalk to the visitor center.

It’s an IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering & Computing, as well as an ASME Mechanical Engineering Landmark!

Looks much smaller from down here!

I swum out in the flat water, enjoying not being pummeled by waves.  A man and a boy rode up on Paso Fino Horses, then tied them up under the coconut palms.  As we were swimming, the boy rode the larger horse, a dapple grey, into the water and they both began swimming.  He asked me if I could hold the bridle as he tied his shoes, then he hopped off the horse and swam alongside the equine.  The horse was non-plussed, but compliant.  The boy rode the horse up onto the beach, exchanging him for a smaller brown Paso Fino.

The second horse, spirited and younger than the first, held no interest in going in the water.  The boy led him toward the waterline where the horse bucked and flicked his tail, but eventually he gave in and followed the boy into the water, still bucking and kicking.

The boy lunged the horse in water about shoulder height, then took him out toward deeper water, and eventually rode the horse as it swum.

Back at the observatory, the coqui sang into the gathering darkness.

Saturday evening we were due to get rinsed by Tropical Storm Raphael.  I wanted to go for a run around the dish, so I checked in at the control room to tell the operator that I was going.  I looked out the window to see a raptor sitting on the railing, looking at us.

I pointed out the raptor to the TO.

“A Puerto Rican eagle!  I’ve never seen one.”  He ran off to grab his camera as the eagle and I stared at one another.  The eagle turned around, fluffed his plumage, turned around to eye me some more, then flew off after the TO returned with his camera, along with someone from electronics whose lens fogged up in the chilly control room.

Creatures, everywhere.

I ran around the dish, listening to the frogs sing.

The storm never arrived.