lupestripe's lair

As part of the undergraduate astronomy degree at my university, all the students spend one week during the summer at the astronomical observatory in Tenerife (Canary Islands) using a small telescope to observe various sources in the sky. This type of "field trip" (as they call) it used to be a standard feature of many UK universities but over time its prevalence has dwindled and we are now one of the few (perhaps the only) department left that still does it as standard pratice. Of course the students don't go to Tenerife on their own - staff have to accompany them, both purely as a chaperone but also to advise them on how to use the telescope, what to observe, and what to do with the data once collected. A call goes out every year for staff to help with this effort, and I've always passed on it: I did so much observing as a student and a postdoc that going to observe didn't seem that special, and it would crimp my summer travel plans.

But, this year I decided that it was finally my "turn". Last year they had great difficulty finding people to go and I felt guilty about not helping, and last fall (when they were already collecting signups) I didn't see anything major on my summer agenda, so I went ahead and put myself down. Of course, in the ensuing months my summer proceeded to become one of the most overcommitted ever... but by then I was locked in. And so, just a few days after returning from New Mexico I was packing up again in preparation for a week in the Canaries.

The students were instructed to gather at the department around 11am on Monday, and they were all there when I arrived, ready to go. The taxi pulled up shortly after and we made our way to the airport - me, one PhD student helper, and seven undergraduates. Adventures awaited!

I shepherded the students (who were pretty quiet) through airport security and let them disperse throughout Manchester T2 while we waited for our flight (which was not for 3 more hours, since a huge amount of contingency was built into the plan). Eventually we boarded, took the long (4.5 hour) flight, and touched down a little before 8pm. Immigraion was slow but eventually we got through, grabbed the bags, and met up with DH, the other staff member on the trip - a famously irritable non-tenured member of staff who I knew mostly as our IT manager but who also served as the leader of the field trip and thus spent every week on site (he was there last week with a different group of students and would stay around a week after I left with a third group). I then picked up the rental car and we made our way to dinner (at McDonald's, since everything else was closed by then) and then up the mountain.

One of the students in my car was having severe motion sickness on the way up and we had to drive extremely slowly around the turns, so we only arrived at the observatory around 2am. In spite of that, DH wanted to give the students a quick safety orientation and then give them a tour of sorts of the night sky (I chimed in when I had things to add) and after that, look through the eyepiece of the 18" portable Celestron telescope that had been set up outside at various sources. Eventually - well after 3am - we went to bed.

The students were told they were "on their own" during the daytime and on Tuesday - after waking up at noon - I mostly just worked from my "Residencia" (dorm) room on other things, though I also found time to walk around seeing all the other telescopes on the mountain. The Teide Observatory where we were is not a famous astronomical site as it has basically no "big" telescopes (I think the largest was only 1.5m). It does have lots and lots of small ones, though; the mountaintop is littered with domes, some from projects I recognized (but mostly facilities unfamiliar to me; some were for things like satellite tracking). The view was also spectacular; the observatory sat on a caldera rim and at the center of the crater stood the towering summit of Teide itself, a classically conical volcano that constantly loomed over us. The sun set at 9pm and the proper observing started soon after - initially DH kept the eyepiece in to view some targets that had already set by the time we arrived the previous day, but after that it was swapped with a CCD detector to actually take and record data.

I'd been giving very little briefing about what my responsibilities were on this trip (other than simply driving the students who couldn't fit in the main van up to the observatory). However, it was clear that they would be expecting me to direct the students in choosing what to actually observe - they were given total free reign on this, with very little guidance about what types of data they were being expected to collect and what they could do with it. From stories I was told about previous trips I knew their inclination was to just go after "pretty objects", which is fine, although I felt pretty strongly that particularly as this was part of a class they were taking at least some (and ideally most) of the time should be devoted to performing some sort of actual quantitative measurement. So I tried to steer them in that direction by suggesting some supernovae and other transients for them to observe (there are always a few bright enough for a small telescope), which they were at least mildly receptive to.

One consequence of our late arrival on Monday is that there wasn't enough time to go to the supermarket to buy enough food for the week - the observatory supplied dinner and a basic set of snacks for the night, but for everything else we were on our own. DH therefore decided to take the group back down the mountain to visit a supermarket and (while they were at it) visit a beach. I had work to do and didn't really care about the beach so I gave him a list of things to buy and - after finishing a few tasks - I took my own rental car to explore around the caldera, stopping at the visitor center (and going for a short walk there) and then driving as far as the crater floor on the far side of Teide before returning. We then had another night of observing, during which I spent quite a bit of time trying to help the students identify a good eclipsing binary star to observe by poring over various papers on the subject. By the end of the night I and the students had found consensus of a good one to go after, although that would have to wait for the next night.

On Thursday I was able to introduce the students to a bit of excitement: a gamma-ray burst had occurred and would still likely be fairly bright that evening. I pointed out in the group chat that had been set up that if we were able to obtain a solid detection we could "publish" it as a GCN Circular, and other scientists could use that to plan observations or maybe even use our data in their papers. Conveniently, on that night (and that night only) we were on a proper professional telescope at the observatory: the IA80, which is only 0.8m in diameter but is still far more capable than the consumer-level portable telescope we were using before. We took the data, got a solid detection, and I challenged the group to see if they could analyze the data and write a report before sunrise. I was expecting they might only be able to obtain one or two measurements, but in fact with only a bit of help from me they were able to obtain measurements from virtually all the observations they took (they ended up observing the source twice and in several different filters). It did take until after sunrise, but at 8am I was able to take the draft they sent me, lightly edit it, and send it out as an official report which they were extremely stoked about.

The next night we were back on the portable telescope. By this point the students were splitting their time between observing new sources and analyzing the data they'd already got, but I was particularly keen for them to observe the eclipsing binary we'd identified two nights prior. (They actually had attempted to observe it on the IAC80, but AI gave them the wrong coordinates and they pointed at the wrong place... lol.) Unfortunately it took them some time to identify the field and by the time it was figured out where to look we'd missed the eclipse, but going back to data files it did turn out that we'd captured it at the very start of the observations, so that felt like a nice success.

Saturday was the last full day on the mountain and as it was the weekend it felt appropriate to spend some time sightseeing a bit. DH had proposed a beach trip but I wanted to go hiking instead, and most of the students ended up going with me. The route that had been recommended to me was closed (or at least the parking was) but we were able to find a decent substitute in the White Mountain trail, which ascended a pumice dome on the flank of Teide and passed a number of huge volcanic boulders which apparently had rolled down active lava flows in the past, picking up lava like a rolling snowball to attain their enormous size. The students slept in extremely late so we didn't leave until 4pm and weren't on the trail until 4:30, but we made it to the top just in time before we needed to make it back for dinner, and the final night of observing. We ended "early" at 3am, although DH wanted to throw back a few beers with me and the PhD student helper talking about how the trip went, and we joined him for that and ended up not actually sleeping until 5am.

Sunday it was finally time to depart. We left around 1pm and made our way back down the mountain, stopping in a beach town on the south side of the island not too far from the airport. There was a 30 minute wait to enter the parking lot but we let the students out to have fun at the beach while DH and I parked our vehicles, and we met them later for a final meal at a beachside restaurant. Then it was time to head back to the airport, return the car, and board our (unfortunately significantly delayed) flight back to Liverpool. I returned home at 3am.

It was a great experience overall. Despite my occasional annoyance at the lack of organization - and more broadly, a concern that my department invests a lot of energy into an event whose educational purpose is a bit vague - I can clearly see now why carrying on with this event is such a point of pride for us. And although it took me almost 10 years to volunteer to help out, I suspect I'll be doing these on a much more regular basis from this point forward.