May 24, 2012
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.
May 24, 2012
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.
The astronomy and planetary science communities have a fantastic tool for finding scientific papers previously published: the Astrophysics Data System, or ADS, supported by NASA and run out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The main feature I use is the abstract service, delivering summaries of papers and more.
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.
May 23, 2012
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.
May 23, 2012
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.
It’s been a pretty exciting week to be an asteroid researcher: you’d think the sky was falling! Really, it was just a confluence of some rowdy neighbors checking in on earth asking, “How’s that space program coming?” An ordinary chondrite meteorite exploded over Russia, and later that day a 150-foot-wide piece of spacerock skimmed 17,000 miles above the earth, just ducking inside the orbits of geostationary satellites.
We had nothing to do with either: the Russia bolide was detected maybe seconds beforehand by some satellites; 2012 DA14 was too low in our sky for Arecibo to observe.
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.
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It’s past 3 am and we’re observing asteroids with the Arecibo planetary radar system. In the lulls between experiments, Twitter conversations covered everything from the Russian bolide explosion, 2012 DA14, Toutatis, rain on Titan, and some jokes about sailing on Saturn’s largest moon. The sky is falling, what else will you talk about?
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.
I spent last week observing of asteroids from the telescope: our first night was just another 8-4 workday night, where we looked at space rocks in our neighborhood and out beyond Mars for eight hours.
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.
If you visit Arecibo Observatory, you’ll probably see the suspended platform from the visitor center.
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.
On Friday’s holiday, a postdoc and I trundled down to the beach to go swimming. Protected by rocky arms, this tiny cove remained still as giant waves broke over the brown barriers.
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.