Searching for ET... among other things

Last Friday, Dr. Bower, one of the Profs. whom Kevin is working with on this trip, kindly offered to drive us up to the Hat Creek Radio Observatory for a 2-day trip. Situated about 265 miles (do the conversion yourself!) Northeast of San Francisco, this is the home of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), one of the key projects of the Radio Astronomy Lab here in UC Berkeley, as well as the flagship instrument of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Apparently, 50% of observing time is allocated for SETI, while the remaining 50% is for other radio astronomy research. Kevin's work in his short stint here is located somewhere within this latter 50%, mainly searching for fast transients (pulses associated with highly energetic explosions/bursts involving compact objects in space). With 42-dishes, hopefully expanding to 350 if they can get more funding, the ATA will also be one of the pathfinder instruments for the SKA.

The forests we passed on the way gave us a taste of things to come...

Finally at the observatory... after about 5 hours on the road.

The ATA in all its majesty... not to mention the glorious mountain ranges in the background! The observatory is actually 4200 feet above sea level!

You don't realize how big the dishes are until you walk right up next to it!

The signal processing room - with their correlators, beamformers, etc

Agnes making good use of her time, while the rest were doing some work.

We're surrounded by mountains really... which means better shielding from radio frequency interference...

After a good dinner at a steakhouse 15 minutes away, we retired to some very comfortable dormitories. Too bad we only found out about the pool table the next morning as we were about to leave!