Lab at the beach

In what will unfortunately probably be my only trip to the beach for the rest of the year, our Ay class enjoyed our first lab at the Santa Monica beach, measuring the time it takes the sun to set from different altitudes. Next we have to calculate the radius of the Earth using this data collected at the beach.

This lab reminds me of the fact that telescopes are often in fun, fun places - such as Hawaii! To do an Ay lab, we go to the beach. To take measurements for a real project, an astronomer might go to Hawaii. Correlation does not prove causation, but I think I see a theme here...

On the drive back from Santa Monica, Professor Johnson explained the importance of the telescope in astronomy projects. As I understand it, part of his motivation for accepting a professorship where he did was that he could continue to use the same telescope that he had been using previously. This is interesting because it shows how important tools are to an astronomer's work - indeed, I asked Professor Johnson how important telescope time was to success as an astrophysicist, and he said that a lot of telescope time could let anyone publish a decent paper, but that brilliant scientists can get by with less.

At Caltech, these two categories are combined as all the brilliant scientists have a plenthora of telescope time! Caltech has a lot of shares in many telescopes: take a look at the Caltech Astro department's summary, http://www.astro.caltech.edu/observatories/. Also, Caltech has a lot of very good astronomers/astrophysicists publishing papers using data from those telescopes! It seems to me almost like a monopoly of astronomy: Caltech and other leading institutions have all the telescope time, which makes these institutions even better as their scientists can use all this time to publish papers!

I would love to hear more about how the telescope time system works from people familiar with it!