 that means p.m. tonight i'm engaging in a proud astronomer tradition i am using a telescope i'm staying up all night to stare at the stars via my computer so these beeps and noises you keep hearing that's the telescope operating remotely really what you're hearing is the chat feature beeping back and forth the annoying noises the annoying noises are really helpful because if you start to fall asleep they're loud and you notice them so the telescope i'm using is the three and a half meter diameter telescope at a patch point in the observatory that telescope right there now i've observed in this telescope a ton in fact i used to work at this telescope after college i worked at this telescope for a while as a telescope operator so on this telescope they split the nights in half so you get sunset to midnight midnight to sunrise and i have be be half tonight so midnight to sunrise i used to do this all the time that was before i had a toddler who likes to wake up at five a.m. this ability to remotely observe is actually an amazing thing and the advantages are obvious right instead of having to fly all the way to new mexico drive several hours of the mountain acclimate to being at nine or ten thousand feet instead of having to do all that i get to wear my slippers and my sweater and drink coffee in my basement there's a huge savings of money huge savings of time and effort there's also accessibility reasons why it's good to be able to observe remotely and the comfort and the safety of your own home so tonight in this video i want to kind of document the process what it's like to observe remotely and it will showcase my descent into madness as i approach 24 hours of being awake a few tips for staying up all night drink a little bit of coffee drink a ton of water cool temperatures for me seem to help so trying to keep the air a little bit cool obviously bright lights a little bit of music whatever you do don't turn off the volume on your laptop one time i did fall asleep while observing sitting on my couch and it was one of these loud beeps which woke me up and meant that we didn't waste a lot of time and money on the telescope all right so we're observing the weather is clear and beautiful start off by observing a standard star so one where we know the brightness we know what the star is supposed to look like so we can calibrate our instrument and now we're off to looking at the first supernova do you want to see a picture of it that's it right there and that's a galaxy all right just after 1 a.m we're on to our second supernova i'm feeling shockingly good for having been up 20 hours at this point i think being an observational astronomer is good preparation for parenthood in terms of sleep deprivation and probably vice versa just to prove how legit of an astronomer i am i have a mouse pad for the observatory i'm using when we observe faint things like this you have to take very long exposures so for this particular supernova i'm doing three exposures at 1200 seconds each this means that you have several minutes of setup where you need to get the telescope very precisely set up and it's tedious and then you wait for an hour oh we just saw a meteor flight through the field check this out all right so this image is what we call the guide camera we're taking spectroscopy which means you break the light into its various colors but we only are able to do that with the light that falls along we call the slit so this is an image of all the rest of the stuff in that field of view so that's a star these are all little stars that was the previous exposure here this was the nest exposure completely saturated well that's certainly fun it's not uncommon to see meteors when you're outside watching the sky it's a little unusual to see them fly through the telescopes field of view like that i mean it doesn't happen every night what's even more wild and it's never happened when i've observed but i've seen pictures of this is when airplanes fly through your field of view and those things are wicked bright so they can really mess up your data okay it's after three i'm starting to get a little tired we're under our fourth supernova two hundred seconds okay when you start to get tired it's really important to triple check everything make sure you type in the right numbers it's really easy to just forget to do one of the exposures so if the weather holds we should be able to observe for at least another hour maybe hour and a half one thing you have to do when you're remotely observing is watch the weather very closely even though there's a person on site who can go outside and look to see what the weather looks like if there's clouds rolling in or the humidity is changing and the telescope might have to close you need to be prioritizing your targets in real time one of the tools at our disposal that makes this a little easier is the cloud camera this is basically like an infrared webcam with a fisheye lens on it i have a small webcam version of it that i can see on my computer but they also archive a movie of this every single night and you can watch the clouds roll by and that makes a sweet time lapse four o'clock we're almost there 10 minutes left on this supernova sunrise isn't for another 52 minutes but twilight started 10 minutes ago even though the sun's not up it's starting to approach the horizon see this is how dark it's supposed to be and you can start seeing the sunrise that's how dark it is now so we're gonna run out this observation and then according to the schedule of my team i gotta go hit a couple of standard stars almost there okay it's almost five o'clock so the last exposures we have to do are basically special lamps they have at the telescope that have particular wavelengths or particular colors that they emit and we use those as a final calibration here's an example of one so each of these lines represents a single wavelength and this is a combination of a helium and neon and argon lamp looks like a sweet barcode all right and that's a wrap five am exactly i'm off to bed science