Artie Aardvark Goes to Greenwich

Artie Aardvark told me to stop working so hard on revising my paper to post about his adventures in Greenwich already.  So here you go! 

What an exciting day- I am in London, and off to see the Royal Observatory in Greenwich!  This might be the most famous observatory in the world because the prime meridian runs through here- the line that all the countries agreed to use when it comes to measuring locations on Earth from East to West.  It’s also the place from where people define Greenwich Mean Time, which is the global standard for time in the world.  It sounds like a really important place to visit!

Artie Aardvark Jaunts to Jodrell Bank

 

Last weekend I had my 15 minutes of Internet fame with a front page AMA about astronomy on Reddit.  Exciting times!  So in honor of that I decided to skip ahead and hand the mic off to Artie Aardvark, who’s been bursting to tell us all about his adventures in England a few weeks ago.

If you’re new to this blog, yes, Artie is an aardvark, and my group’s project mascot.  He comes with my on astronomy adventures, as he can explain what he sees far better than I could.  Enjoy!

Today is an exciting day: I am off to Jodrell Bank Observatory in England to see all the radio telescopes!  Jodrell Bank is one of the most important radio observatories in the world, with some of the biggest radio telescopes you can find anywhere.  It is south of Manchester in the country, with a lot of sheep and cows all around.  Look there in the distance- is that a radio telescope?

Time to turn off cell phones so they don’t interfere with the sensitive radio telescopes- we must be getting close!

 

Of course, once we get to the observatory it’s pretty obvious!

This is the Lovell telescope, which is the third biggest steerable radio telescope in the world.  Wow!  The dish is 250 feet across at the top, and they use it for a lot of research things like pulsars, which are the spinning cores of stars that exploded in what is called a supernova.  Astronomers study the neatest things!

Unfortunately I couldn’t see the telescope in action, as it was undergoing maintenance and it was stowed pointing straight up for this.  But I did find a model in the observatory showing just what the telescope would look like if you could see the top part.

 

Then I got to work, keeping an eye on some data coming in to the observatory…

Be careful though not to get too curious and be stuck behind this door in the control center!  This giant door looked like a safe to me, but was actually where a lot of equipment like the computer servers for the observatory are kept.  This is because they give off a lot of radiation in radio frequencies the astronomers are studying, so they have to be kept in a special vault to make sure the signals from them don’t get out.  Jodrell Bank still worries about a lot of things like that- the astronomers are forever complaining that you can’t have a wifi network for example!

(Editor’s note: the SKA office is next door to the observatory building though, and they have wifi. Conclude what you will!)

Here’s the observatory building from the outside- that “little” radio telescope isn’t all that little at all, as it’s 42 feet across!  Astronomers use it to monitor the Crab Pulsar, which is left over from a supernova explosion about a thousand years ago.  In fact, people all over Earth recorded seeing this explosion as there was a “guest star” in the sky!  The Crab Pulsar gives of all kinds of radiation to this day, and astronomers are studying the system constantly in order to learn more about young pulsars.

I also went for a walk towards the back of the building and saw radio telescopes everywhere!  This telescope is called Mark II, and was being repainted by workers when I visited. All telescopes have to be painted in England else they’ll rust, and astronomers choose white to reflect as much of the sun as possible from the dish.  Mark II isn’t actually used on its own much like the other telescopes, and instead is usually used with a bunch of other radio telescopes around the world networked together- a trick astronomers use to get more detailed images called interferometry.  Jodrell Bank is a huge center for a place to process all these signals.

There are all sorts of other telescopes to explore at Jodrell Bank though!  This one looked pretty crazy to me- it’s a test project to have a student telescope for students from the University of Manchester.  It’s hard for me to believe that radio telescopes can look like this, but they were in fact testing it when I visited by listening to radio signals from the sun!

All told, I had a really fun time visiting Jodrell Bank and seeing what radio astronomers do!  But all too soon it was time to go, and catch a train to London- Yvette promised to take me to the Greenwich Observatory next!  Oh boy!

World’s Longest Zip-Line at Icy Strait Point, Alaska

“Just think of it like a really long roller coaster,” I advised.  My parents and I were spending the day at Icy Strait Point near the tiny town of Hoonah, Alaska.  It’s a privately owned place and run by native Tlingits in an old cannery area converted for tourism.  There isn’t much to Icy Strait Point (or Hoonah for that matter) except the world’s longest zip-line which towers from the mountain above town.

Now I suspect anyone who’s read this blog over the years knows what happened next, because I am not a woman who can turn down something like a zip-line that is over a mile long (officially it’s 5,330 feet, with a 1,300 foot vertical drop).  But I suppose after years of reading of his daughter’s exploits in various corners my dad felt the urge to join in too, and my mother decided to establish which side of the family the adrenaline junkie stuff comes from by staying at the bottom.

And hey, on the scale of adrenaline-y things to do, it turns out this zip-line isn’t too hard- not like you need to jump into the abyss yourself.  But that didn’t mean my father wasn’t going to have to endure some cheery speculation on maintenance standards in the Alaskan wilderness and the like on the ride up in a refurbished school bus from his daughter.

But anyway, the ride up takes about 45 minutes, and the ride down takes about 90 seconds.  And if a picture is worth a thousand words than who knows what a video makes, so here’s the entire experience!

Altogether not a bad experience at all!  And then we spent the rest of the day wandering around a bit.  It’s certainly a nice corner of the world when you have sunshine to enjoy and sea stars to spot in the water.

Dispatch from the Yukon

This has nothing to do with my previous post here, but rather was crafted today and thought some of you might enjoy a “real time” update on my adventures in the North!

August 18, year of our lord 2014
Dawson City, Yukon Territory

Dear Log,
I have survived the Wild, as my friend Jack London refers to her, and staked a claim on Bonanza Creek next to where the first gold was discovered. Alas I am not a good gold planner, and will be abandoning my claim to favor my previous life calling.
Nevertheless I am in good spirits, and would declare this expedition as successful and morale high despite the low American bacon rations. Dawson City is a frontier town with every 19th century convenience a body would expect, from wooden sidewalks to false storefronts to a lascivious gambling hall where the can-can is common. The natives, or “Canadians” as they call themselves, are a friendly people even if the men often proudly display missing front teeth in these parts due to a barbaric ritual game on ice popular to show bravery.*
I will hasten to return to Alaska on the morrow by way of the Yukon River and, by grace of Providence, onwards to Anchorage where I will secure passage to the Netherlands in the coming days. I pray my resolve will see me through!

Yours faithfully,
Miss Yvette Cendes

*Ed. note: seriously, I’ve seem ’em around!

Misty Fjords National Monument

First of all, I feel obliged to mention that Misty Fjords National Monument did not live up to its name at all.  This is because we had spectacular blue sky weather that only happens about 5% of the time in the Ketchikan area, so the fjords were not at all misty but I don’t think anyone was complaining!

Ketchikan, Alaska

When you wake up with a view like this you know it’s going to be a good day!

Vancouver

In honor of the first person who is going to point out Vancouver is not a part of Alaska, allow me to explain that I am catching a ship here north (later today). But a shame to not look around here first…

Vancouver honestly strikes me as a generic modern city whose charm lies in how easy it is to escape to the outdoors, be it the beach or the mountains via bike or boat or whatever you like. In my short time there I spent the majority of my time awake either on a bike or at the beach with an old travel buddy, which is a great way to kick start a holiday!

But all too soon it was time to go. The city near wilderness is a nice layover, but the Last Frontier calls…

Announcing the Alaska Adventure

I’ve often told people that one of my hobbies involves planning trips I won’t necessarily take.  (I probably won’t be taking the trans-Siberian imminently, but I know the full details on how to do it and where to stop!) Eventually I will come across someplace so amazing and so spectacular that, well, I have to go.  In a world of incredible places to visit with things to do and see, it’s best to follow the dreams that keep with you.

Anyway, Alaska started like this sometime last year- I was checking out Wikivoyage with the vague idea that it might be nice to visit some new part of the US in my summer that I hadn’t been before (so it feels like going home, while seeing something new), and it should have wilderness because the Netherlands lacks this, and and have an adventure… and, well, if you are an American looking for mountains and wilderness and a grand adventure it turns out we have this place twice the size of Texas apparently devoted to that.  And apparently if the bears don’t eat you it’s quite fantastic!  So the idea for the Alaska trip was born.

And man oh man, it’s hard to believe, but I’m on the plane in a few hours to start the journey!  First going to Vancouver, which is not in Alaska but a rather nice stop along the way (and the only place I have been before on this trip, when I was 11 or so).  I’ll be in Alaska proper by the weekend, heading on the route you see above… where I realize the names of the places themselves are not shown, but includes many a cute town and national park.

With that, not much to say but I’m excited to go, and I intend to track a few numbers for this trip:

Number of days: 26 (alas this is known)
Number of flights:
Number of days with rain:
Number of national parks:
Number of glaciers:
Number of different kinds of beer:
Mammal species seen:
Number that got too close for comfort:
Number of fish types eaten:
Modes of transport:
Miles driven on rental car:
Highest and lowest prices of gas:
Highest and lowest elevations:
Number of geocaches found:
Locations slept:
Number of festivals:
Books read:

Man oh man, this is gonna be great!

Have you been to Alaska, and have a tip to share, or do you have a suggestion for another number to track?  Let me know!

Norway Fjords in a Nutshell

It has occurred to me that before I head off on my big summer adventure to Alaska I really ought to post some pictures of the other corner of the north I explored, the fjords of Norway.  So let’s go on a little adventure, shall we?

Tales from Bergen, Norway

Norway has been on my list for a long time now, but I knew enough about the place that I decided if and when I finally visited I wanted to do it right.  There was enough to see it was more than just a weekend destination, it rained often enough it was worth looking up just when it rained the least during the year, and it was far enough north that I knew to visit during the long days near the summer solstice.  I mean if you were going to a land of world-renowned scenery and $15 pints of beer in the pubs you’d make sure you maximized good weather, right?  Right.

So anyway, I finally found a long weekend straddling the end of May and beginning of June to visit, bought a ticket to Bergen on the coast entered the country armed with an umbrella and duty-free liquor… and promptly never needed the umbrella as the sun shone gloriously for 18 hours every day. (The duty free liquor was actually more for my Norwegian Airbnb hosts than for me, as the cardinal rule of Norway is you must always offer to bring alcohol to its citizens when visiting.) Seriously, I even got a little sunburnt by the end of it as taking sunscreen to Norway was just something that had not occurred to me!

All told, it was glorious.  Really.  I chose to base myself in Bergen, the second largest city of Norway with less than 300,000 people, a bustling harbor front, and a historic area of lovely little wooden houses called Bryggen, or Norwegian for “wharf.”  Every day the fishmongers still set up in the wharf area hawking their wares so you can have a nice meal by the water trying all the different sea creatures, as they have since times of yore except for the fact that the fishmongers now speak Spanish and Italian to each other, and on weekends the boaters from the area all tie up on the wharves for a bit of a party.  It’s all very hard not to like.

Once the town got boring (really, it was small, so I’m not sure it was a “city”) one could head up into the mountains around town via cable car or incline- Pittsburgh-ese for funicular- and go hiking in the mountains around town.  I guess you could hike up the entire way too, but I preferred to save my energy to maximize the areas above the tree line where the view was spectacular.

Even if I hadn’t seen the fjords (which I did on a long day trip I’m determined to post pictures from still) Norway would have unquestionably qualified as a new favorite- no small thing to say when it’s your 55th country.  My only regret about the entire thing is I am now surely disappointed for the rest of my life when it comes to the weather in Norway- for me it should always be sunny with blue skies- though in the grand scheme of problems that’s a burden I’m happy to bear!