Saturday, September 02, 2006

Happy Times


It must be that time of year again because I'm working fairly diligently on a Saturday, I'm sure my astronomer friends know exactly what I mean, but for the rest of you not in the know I'm talking about proposal time. The most stressful time of the year (and it happens twice a year). Astronomers spend their lives either proposing to get time on an instrument or reducing the data they got previously in hopes that that will satisfy the telescope allocation comittee and therefore allow them to get their hands on even more data. Its all a vain hope, you can never satisfy a TAC.

This next month will involve me running around (figuratively, it all happens online), trying to figure out how long it will take on a particular instrument to do what I want, and whether I'd be better off being less ambitious in my goals.

The goal this time is to beat last times allocation, which was 53 hours over 3 proposals, this time it looks like I could well be up to 5 proposals, asking for 120 hours of 8m time. If the coke machine isn't refilled soon we could all be screwed.

P.S. Expect a post about some cranks A.S.A.P.

1 comment:

NPR said...

Dude cheers for chats about Gemini today.
Where's the "crank" chat...?? ;-)