Tuesday June 2nd 2009. Day 19.

 

Thanks heavens that it is Tuesday! This is my eighth consecutive day and it feels like it, particularly when I am at work around ten and a half hours a day. I am really beginning to get extremely tired, particularly as the bicycle is hard going. Tomorrow, it goes to the workshop for an adjustment. Right now I am getting at home in the evenings extremely tired and the last hill is giving me the most appalling pain in my lower back around my kidneys. Tonight it was so bad with a bit of wind in my face that I considered dismounting and walking.

 

There are all kinds of minor dramas going on. This morning was the weekly planning meeting. This is done by telecom and should start at 9am. So far they have never managed to do this. The idea is that the meeting should last no more than 3 hours and should be completed in less. Today, it was still going after more than 4 hours and finally, after skipping effectively several items on the agenda, we finished around 1:30pm. There was a lot of discussion on the issue of the reaction wheels and some discussion on first light. As a follow-up to yesterday I was asked if there were any other nice galaxy candidates to observe. This meant running out of the meeting for a while to do some checking. Several interesting objects were found that were worth passing on. However, everything points to one particular object as being the favourite.

 

However, a complication is the fact that instrument set-up for observations is going to be far from simple because, of course, they have not seen the sky yet, so they don’t know exactly what instrument settings to use. We have also not been able to check exactly where we are pointing on the sky: out startrackers point backwards and, until we can check the alignment, we cannot guarantee that we are looking exactly where we think that we are looking. So we need to do a quite large map to ensure that what we do look at is what we are planning to look at and not a nearby area of blank sky. It is not an easy task to take a look at the sky for the first time with a new telescope and have things go well, so there is some nervousness about this. However, it has been agreed that as soon as that cover comes off we are going to have a go and see what happens, although accepting that maybe it will not be an image as spectacular as it would be in a week or two.

 

 

Unofficial Herschel image of the day archive:

 

http://www.observadores-cometas.com/Herschel/Image_of_the_day/image_of_the_day.htm

 

Frequent updates are provided during the day on the Herschel Twitter (ESAHerschel) here:

 

http://twitter.com/

 

You can follow Herschel testing and observations in real time on the Twitter.