 Hi, I'm Stefania and I'm going to show you a night in the life of an astronomer at Siding Spring Observatory. So tonight we are going to observe galaxies using the Hector instrument, which is an integral field spectroscopy instrument that allows us to grab data for galaxies in a specially resolved manner. It's quite a special place because you can do science while you're in contact with nature. So now we're going to go back inside and we're going to get ready for the night to do some calibration and take some data. So we are in the control room now and we have different machines that operate different parts of the telescope and the instrument. So all this side here is used by the night assistant to actually move the telescope, so to open for example the mirror, to open the shutter. We astronomers focus on these machines over here and we use this one to run Hector, so the instrument and the spectrographs related to the instrument. What we usually hope for is to have our plate ready in the afternoon and then observe seven times for half an hour and then we can go upstairs, change the plate and do everything again. This is a nice, smooth observing day like night. Okay, let's start. Okay, let's Hector. It's all tucked in like a baby. These are optical fibers and these are X-Mando. So we put one galaxy in each of these. So this is our four meter angle Australian telescope and we can do some really cool stuff like we can study the stellar content, the gas content of the galaxy. So we observed this plate last night, so we are now kind of unplugging everything because the plate is done. We'll start the night with a new configuration. Next, G4. G2. All the fibers, we kind of need to plug them by hand. Is it true? It's getting busy. This is a special place because many astronomers don't actually have that opportunity to do this kind of more hands-on job, like everything is kind of remote nowadays. Okay, four 10, not too bad. Is anyone in the dome? Okay, no one is in the dome, so we can turn the lights off. So this is going to take a while and we need to be ready at 5.30, that's when sunset is. So now we are loading the finds with the coordinates of the galaxy that we want to observe. So the telescope will know where to point. Please move the telescope at Zanit. We would like to take some dome flats, please. Hector is an instrument for a galaxy survey. So it's called the Hector Galaxy Survey where we're going to observe 15,000 galaxies over six years. So we usually observe for around 100 nights per year. So this is just one of them. Okay, so when this one finishes, so like in 25 minutes we go upstairs. Okay, I think we can go. It's just raining out. During the night we are on a tighter schedule because it's clear. So we want to go and sky and take our observations. It's cold in here. When you plug and unplug, it's when you don't feel the cold because you're more focused. We had a really smooth day, so we can take more time to do this. Okay, done. This is the galaxy that's within Examandel A using Hector. We can actually do spectroscopy of the galaxy, so we don't only have the photometry, but we can do this spectroscopy. You can see it here, right? The light and we can reconstruct some important properties like kinematics that you couldn't do using only photometry. Let's go to bed. As soon as, yeah, the last exposure is done will be, okay, let's go to bed. So it was a very successful night here at the AAT. We take beautiful data whether at the end was good. So, yeah, successful. Thank you for staying with me for a night in the life of an astronomer. And now I'm gonna go to bed. Gonna do it all over again tomorrow.