Smashed windshields, Millenium Falcons, microwaved light bulbs, canyon-jumping good times.

The past few weeks have been full of ups and downs.

Let’s start with a downer. I walked out to my car a couple mornings ago to find the rear windshield smashed out by a rock, which was still lying serenely in the backseat. My innocent blue Chevy was sitting amid a sea of vehicles in a campus parking lot, yet mine was the only one targeted. Luckily, this is Arizona, so I didn’t really need to worry about rain for a while before I could get the windshield replaced (at a cost of $230). I never really expected Flagstaff to be a dangerous place, even after getting my windshield smashed out, but just today one of my housemates was biking along a trail winding through the southern part of the Northern Arizona University campus when he came across a couple doo-ragged guys beating the crap out of each other in broad daylight. Maybe they were just practicing?

On the upside, I had my first real mountain biking experience last weekend. A couple friends and I biked 24 miles from campus to the top of a mountain looming 2,500 feet over Flagstaff and back. The mountain has a couple of peaks, all of which have a huge array of antennas and a watchtower on top. We played leapfrog with a more experienced mountain biker as we took a windy, switchbacky, pot-holed service road up the mountain. We asked him to recommend us another trail to get back down, and he pulled out a map and pointed. “You guys want just a little technical? A little taste of downhill? Then this is the trail you want.” The trail was rated one X (on a scale from one to three Xs, with more Xs indicating a harder trail), but looking back I think the Xs may have actually been skull and crossbones. I asked what trail he was taking back down. “Oh, my trail isn’t even on the map,” he said. This guy totally overestimated our skill level – the trail was deceptively easy while it was level and following a ridgeback, but soon it plunged headfirst down the mountainside. The trail was littered with logs, roots, and giant rocks, not to mention it was extremely steep and narrow… if you took a rock the wrong way you’d fly off the mountain.

Every Saturday we’ve chosen a new place to explore. On the first weekend, we hiked into the bowels of a blown-apart cinder cone, then crawled into a dormant lava river tube. The next weekend, we hiked around in the Red Rocks desert around Sedona, world-renowned for its “vortexes” that emanate mystical, healing energies. This past Saturday, we went up to the Grand Canyon. We were stuck on a shuttle bus during a thunderstorm, but decided to go ahead and start hiking into the canyon anyway. We were the last ones to hit the trail before the storm, so by the time the clouds burned off an hour later, we had that much time to spend in solitude eating lunch and chilling out at the tip of a ridge jutting into the canyon. The views were absolutely stunning, 360 degrees around. The floor of the outer canyon, formed by the material eroded from the collapsing rim walls that has washed down to the river, had the color of guacamole with all of its shrubby, dusty plant life. The Colorado river itself was so deep in the inner canyon that you can’t even see it unless you hike a couple miles down from the rim.

On Sundays, one of us cooks for all the others. We’ve had steak and potatoes on the grill, fajitas/quesadillas/margaritas, and chicken puttanesca. All 12 of us astronomy interns (four REU students working at Lowell Observatory, five REU students working at NAU, two MIT students, and one student working at the Naval Observatory) have become very close in the past couple weeks. I bought a flat-screen LCD TV, so everyone gathers at our apartment to watch movies and party on the weekends. We play a sport just about every day – volleyball up at Lowell, basketball and soccer down at the NAU campus. I’ve become known for a couple moves in volleyball, including “the hammer” and jumping up in the air to spike when it’s completely unnecessary to jump at all. This kid we played volleyball with even asked if I was a martial artist because of the way I chopped and punched at the ball, then asked if I played tennis because of the way I served.

I suppose I should say a few obligatory words about my research. Last week I wrote my first program. Well, scratch that… I wrote my first program in a decade. I taught myself Java and Basic when I was 13 while I was grounded from my computer games for a month, but I haven’t programmed since. My research advisor was gone to a conference in Canada last week, so I used my down time to teach myself FORTRAN (the standard for scientific applications) and IDL (a proprietary language used extensively by astronomers for data analysis and visualization) and wrote a couple programs from scratch for my research.

One of my programs allows me to overplot contour maps of geometrically aligned images observed at different wavelengths. I’ve spent a good amount of my time exploring these images, some of which have such high resolution that we can see an incredible amount of structure in the core of the galaxies too. Some of these bright “knots” look like stars, but we can’t be absolutely sure what they are until we get spectral information in order to determine their redshift or until we correlate them with pockets of gas from 21-cm radio data. I’ve been experimenting with point-spead function (PSF) fitting in a program called IRAF in order to subtract foreground stars across the face of a galaxy in order to compute accurate surface photometry – that is, how the brightness of the galaxy changes with radius from the center – just in case we figure out if the knots are indeed foreground stars or are bright, star-forming nebulae within the galaxy.

This week, since my advisor is back from Canada, she’s teaching me how to run another data reduction program called AIPS in order to perform the monumentally challenging task of building spectra and contour maps from radio interferometric data collected with the VLA (the big antenna dishes seen in the movie Contact). Once I know more about it, I’ll give an overview of interferometry in my next update, but so far it is clear to me that radio data will provide us a huge amount of information about the star formation in our galaxies, as well as about the bulk motion and turbulence of the gas within them.

Well, I’m spent. Here’s some pictures:

My shattered rear windshield with mountains in the background.

We're chilling out eaten snacks at the top of a mountain overlooking Flagstaff.

A couple of the other students I work and live with hanging out in the Grand Canyon.

Overlooking the Grand Canyon. This is not a place for the faint of heart.

I am renowned for my floppy hat. I gave my jacket to one of the girls, so that hat was all I had to protect me from the rain.

I'm leaping like a flying squirrel into a creek at the bottom of a gorgeous canyon.

Mashing potatoes the cheap college student way... with a beer bottle.

The Millenium Falcon is airborne! (Don't worry, it's just a kite we spent an hour building.)

Sweet glowing light bulb in the microwave.