As you probably know, the life of an astronomer is usually one filled with travel. If you’re an optical astronomer (I’m not), then this also includes jetting off around the globe to observe at a variety of observatories that are usually located in the middle of nowhere. This year was no different for me, but I think it’s worth looking back at the travel that came about this year (if for no other reason than for me to remember all of the places I’ve been and why I feel tired all of the time).
This draft has been hiding in my “To finish” folder since mid-December, so I’m pushing out Part I here.
First, let’s talk about the travel I didn’t do in the early part of the year. Every December / January there’s the double whammy of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meting and the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting. I had about a dozen proposals due in January (both the NuSTAR observing proposals as well as several larger proposals for data analysis programs, proposals to be part of a theoretical networks, which to date is my favorite collaboration acronym, which was “SCORPIONS”). So the start of my travel year didn’t actually kick in until March. This, of course, couldn’t last and led to three trips in four weeks spanning Chicago, Los Angeles, and London/Rome.
Chicago, IL:
High Energy Astrophysics in the 2020s and Beyond
Okay, so technically it was Chicago. In truth, it was the Chicago airport hotel. We can’t always jaunt into the city to live it up along Michigan Ave. This meeting brought together almost every major instrument team (spanning large- to small-missions all the way down the CubeSats). The intent was to kick start the thinking ahead of the 2020 Decadal Survey (more on that in a future post). This was the first time I presented the MonSTER CubeSat concept (a name which I still stand by, except possibly for the dubious capitalization).
Travel dates: March 18 – March 21 (4 days)
Distance traveled: roughly 3,500 miles (5600 km)
Burbank, CA
For once, this particular meeting didn’t fall on either my birthday or one of my family’s birthdays (though I did pull off a five year old’s gymnastics birthday party in the morning and go to this meeting in the evening). And the bonus was that I didn’t have to fly anywhere. That being said, the problem is that I also had to drive to Burbank (for at least the first two days of the meeting).
Now, technically both Burbank and Long Beach are in the great Los Angeles area. And some people might think that Burbank is relatively close to Long Beach. According to Google, it’s about 38 miles, which is roughly the same distance as you’ve got between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. However. All of that distance is directly across the heart of Los Angeles. Meaning that in the first two days when I drove in I spent more time in the car than I spent on the plane heading to Chicago. Thankfully, the organizer took pity on my on the final couple of days and I got a hotel room to stay in, so I took the train to and fro on the last day. And yes, there are trains in Los Angeles and they do occasionally travel to destinations where you need to go. It’s not all that often, but it can happen.
I would say the highlight of this trip was actually the other occupants of the hotel. Evidently there was some event/audition/filming happening nearby (I would guess Disney) for incredibly good looking young people (I would guess all under 20) who were staying in the hotel with their parents. Yes, there was occasional bad guitar playing. Yes, they were all more fashionable than I have ever been in my life.
Travel dates: March 25 – March 28 (~3 days)
Distance traveled: ~150 miles
London / Rome / Avigliano Umbro, Italy:
The 2018 IACHEC meeting
IACHEC (the International Astronomical Consortium for High Energy Calibration, and pronounced “eye-uh-check” or “ey-yah-check” or “yah-check” depending on the accent of the person speaking) is where all of the people who build X-ray telescopes get together to air our dirty laundry. The problem of course is that our instruments are too big and unwieldy to fully calibrate and teat on the ground, so you have to do it in space. For those into digital photography, this is kind of like not knowing how to white balance your images. And Nature hasn’t given us any nice, well lit white walls to color test against.
Aside: if you’re not into photography that’ll make no sense either. The TL;DR version here is that when different telescopes with different cameras look at the same star/black hole/supernova remnant we all see slightly different things. IACHEC is where we go to argue about who’s right and who’s wrong (or at least, who is more confident in expressing how correct they are).
Because, as a ground, instrument builders tend to be fairly loud when we argue about things like this, we organize this meeting in out of the way places. The first was 25 km away from Reykjavík in Iceland in a place so remote they had to bring in their own wine (and overhead projectors). This meeting was marginally less remote, but still a two hour bus ride away from Rome. Which meant that it was nearly impossible to get there on a straight shot without spending an extra night in Europe.
This led to the great Grefenstette cousin mini-reunion of 2018 in London. If you don’t know me all that well, it’s worth noting that I’m the oldest of 25 (I think) first cousins on the Grefenstette side (yes, we’re prolific). I’d planned to see one cousin in London, which somehow turned into four of us being in the same city at the same time. That’s actually more statistically likely than one might expect. After a red-eye into London I managed to get a few hours of sleep before touring around Richmond for most of an unseasonably nice London Spring day before heading off to Rome the following morning.
The IACHEC meeting itself was entertaining and informative (as always). To steal an ominous phrase, it feels like the majority of our work is to try to reduce the unknown unknowns to known unknowns with error bars. Every time I attend an IACHEC I come away with a better understanding of how everyone else’s instruments work and roughly six months of leads I need to chase down for mine.
Non-science highlights of this trip: Many. But the Grefenstette pub night in London and then playing live piano karaoke (reading chords from someone’s iPad for a variety of songs) for a bunch of astronomers in Rome have to stand out here.
Travel dates: April 6 – April 13 (8 days)
Round-trip Distance traveled:
LAX – London: 11,000 miles (19,000 km)
London – Rome: 1800 miles (3,000 km)
Rome –> conference: 160 miles (260 km)
Total: ~14,000 miles (23,000 km)
Austin, TX:
2018 SPIE Astronomical Instruments Meeting
Thankfully, after a packed late March / early April I had about a month and a half off from work travel. There was an amazing anniversary (sans kiddo) trip up to Mendocino in there as well a Memorial Day weekend at the pool in Palm Springs, but the next work trip didn’t land until mid-June. When it’s an absolutely fantastic time to visit Austin, Texas (said no one ever).
Yes, my hotel was only 0.9 miles from the conference center. I thought that’d be fine. This turned out to not be the case when it was 95 degrees and 98% humidity.
Look, I grew up in Washington, D.C. It was humid. It was sticky. There were mosquitoes the size of small birds. Austin’s weather was worse. However, the conference was great, the barbecue was better, and this reintroduced me to the idea that “beef brisket” is absolutely amazing. Highlights of this trip included “getting misters sprayed on you at a restaurant at 11 o’clock at night because it was so hot” and “the instant fogging up of my glasses as I walked into the conference center because they maintain it at brisk Fall temperatures”.
Travel dates: June 10 – 15 (6 days)
Round-trip Distance traveled:
Distance Traveled: 2,800miles (4500 km)
Salt Lake City / Logan, UT:
2018 Small Sat Conference
Rounding out my summer travel was a trip out to the annual Small Sat conference at Utah State University.
I’d never been to this conference before, and found out that I’d gotten a talk in the “Pre-Conference Workshop”. Not really knowing the size of the conference, I’d turned up expecting to give a talk in front of a dozen or so students and felt prepared for a meeting on that scale. That feeling of preparedness instantly went away when I turned up on the Saturday of the “pre-conference” to see roughly 1,500 people having a sponsored lunch (by one of the many rocket companies in attendance). And the talks were in the newly remodeled performing arts center theatre at Utah State, which has about three thousand seats.
This was the first “TED”-style talk that I’d ever given (wireless headset mic and all). With that many people in the room I pretty much had to give up on my standard “find a couple of familiar faces and give the talk to them” approach and had to flash back to whatever I remembered from being in youth theatre when I was 15 as far as properly working a stage. The talk was streamed live, with M recording a copy as she and O were watching it, which means in principle that I could go back and see how I did…but I haven’t made myself do it yet. I definitely regret not getting a haircut ahead of time…
Needless to say, I spent the first night in Utah frantically re-writing my talk away from one appropriate for “people who build instruments” to one appropriate for “people who sell you the stuff on the spacecraft.”
Some interesting stuff about Logan, Utah: Most restaurants have 4.2% beer only. And everything is closed on Sundays. I mean, everything. Which presented an interesting challenge when trying to find someplace to eat the second day. The outdoor spaced look amazing for hiking, but there were about half a dozen wildfires in progress so unfortunately walking the half-mile from my hotel to the downtown strip in Logan felt like smoking a pack of cigarettes.
Overall, the trip was great, the conference swag was amazing. I think one of the highlights was meeting one group of high-school students from Northern Virginia (at a science and tech magnet school where several of my friends went) who were flying their first CubeSat and middle school students (admittedly from the Space Coast in Florida) who were flying their second CubeSat. Before they were old enough to drive. Amazing.
Travel dates: August 4 – 10 (6 days)
Round-trip Distance traveled:
LAX-SLC: 1,180 miles (1900 km)
SLC-Logan: 160 miles (260 km)
Total Distance: 1,340 miles (2,160 km)
Part II (covering the end of 2018) coming soon…(he said hopefully)