14 July 2004

Observing Location	NY Hall of Science, Corona, Queens, NY
Observational Period	0730-0830 EDT
Atmospheric Conditions	It was sunny and already hot as well as being hazy. Transparency Good Seeing Good
Instruments	Brunton 8x21 compact binocular w/shade 14 gold welder's glass - Charlie
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway

Target	Sunspots
Constellation	Psc
Category	Solar
Time	20060714. 0745 EDT
Comments	There may be a small spot there somewhere but if there is it is too small for me to see it with the hand held 8x binocular.   Groups Spots R North 0 0 0 South 0 0 0 Total 0 0 0

Target	Moon
Constellation	Aqr
Category	Lunar
Time	20060714.0800 EDT
Comments	The waning gibbous Moon was just setting behind the Hall of Science from where I was standing in the employee parking lot. With the small binocular I wasn’t able to identify much but it was a nice view with the bright gray Moon hanging in the light blue sky over the convoluted shape of the cement and dale glass portion of the original building.

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Observing Location	Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY
Observational Period	1000-1415 EDT

I had an opportunity to go out to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, on Long Island with the NY Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club to take a custom tour. There were nine of us and we were hosted by a PhD and other PhDs explaining each of the sites we saw.

BNL is a Department of Energy research facility that does all kinds of research. I was there years (and years) ago as a cub scout and remember looking down into the moon pool where they store radioactive fuel for the reactor that is now being decommissioned. They do a lot of medical research and in particular NASA space medicine research to determine the effects of radiation on men and materials. Out tour focused on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). We also saw the Tandem Van de Graff Generator that produces the ions for RHIC and the National Synchrotron Light Source.

The Lab is a large facility on mostly forested (natural and reforested pine forests) land. The big thing there is RHIC but it is not in the densest part of the facility. It can be seen in this image as the bars earth ting at the top.

Here is an image with the RHIC components labeled.

Ions are created in the Tandem Van de Graff Generators at the bottom of the image (labeled Tandem) and follow the gold line up to the Booster Ring. The generator produces the ions and gets them moving at 5% of the speed of light. After leaving the building in a confined beam they make a U-turn and head over to the booster ring where they spin around clockwise and reach 37% of the speed of light. From there they move over to the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) where they rotate counterclockwise where it reaches % of the speed of light. Once they are at speed they are transferred to the RHIC ring where half of them rotate in one beam going clockwise and the other half and another beam going counterclockwise. Here they reach 99.995% of the speed of light. Once they have reached that speed they could continue their rotation at that speed for 24 hours without further energy input as long as the vacuum is maintained. But the beams are made to collide at experimental stations and are exhausted after about 10 minutes. An ion travels around the entire 2.4 mile track in about 40 nanoseconds.

I’ll start here where the ions are created in the Tandem Van De Graff Generator. It is called the Tandem because there are two generators there so they can supply two different types of ions simultaneously. Most of the ions they supply to RHIC are gold ions.

This is where the ions are actually created.

The explanation we got was that magic happens in there.

The ions then move into the accelerator here.

In the accelerator more electrons are stripped off of them causing them to become strongly charged and repulsive to a negative energy source which is what increases their speed. When they leave the accelerator they are only a gold nucleus.

We saw large cement rolling doors and asked how noisy it was when the generator is running and if people could be in the area when it was and were told that the generator at the other end of the building was indeed running while we were there.

It is safe to be in the room most of the time. It is only when they are producing certain types of ions that it has to be vacated and sealed.

We didn’t see anyone else in the room while we were there and very few people moving around the building in general.

The Tandem also has several beams where experiments are done. We were told about one company that brings rolls of polymer in and has them swept by a beam which puts tiny holes in the polymer which is then sold for ultra-filtration. It costs the company $831 and hour to access the beam.

Our next stop was the National Synchrotron Light Source but that doesn’t contribute to the RHIC experiments so I will skip over it for now and go right up to the RHIC where we went after lunch which was surprisingly good for cafeteria food.

This is the control room for the beam. It coordinates the flow of ions from the Tandem through the Booster and AGS and up to the RHIC.

On the back console you can see the lockout panel with various colors and shapes of tags attached to the keys. Whenever someone goes into the rings they remove the appropriate key and the ring is shut down and can not be restarted until the key is put back.

A display at one of the consoles.

Then we drove over to the tunnel containing the ring. The tunnel is built above ground and has dirt piled over it, at least where we drove over it to get to the road that goes around its inside.

Inside the tunnel are two long pipes, one color coded blue and the other yellow. The beam in them goes in the opposite direction.

There are actually two pipes there lying side by side. In order to keep the beams in the pipes in phase with each other they switch position every 60 degrees so the inside beam becomes the outside beam. The places where this occurs are also the places where experiment stations are located.

Outside the building is a section of pipe that has its ends capped in acrylics so you can see what is inside.

This diagram will give you an idea of how big the beam actually is. I think the pipe is nearly a yard across and the tube that confines the beam is the white area at the center of the diagram and is about 2-3 inches in diameter. I didn’t pace it off but figure each section of pipe is about 20-30 feet long.

Wherever the pipes join there are metal bellows to allow for the cooling down of the ring when it is in operation. I put my fingers around a sample of one of the joints and could easily compress it.

In each section of pile are also sensors to determine where the beam is in the time (closest to the camera) so they can adjust the magnets to keep the beam bending with the ring, and vacuum pumps to suck all the air out of the tube so there is nothing there to slow the beam down.

And now back to the National Synchrotron Light Source.

The NSLS can produce two types of light: UV and x-ray.

There is a synchrotron at the center of the building and beams come off it at tangents all the way around it. The building has a very strange shape because of this. It follows the shape of the various beams rather than being a big block.

Our first stop was just inside the entry where there are glass windows looking out over the lab. We suspect that this is what you see when you take the Sunday tours during the summer. We actually went down into the lab and talked with the scientists.

The first thing we noticed looking out over the floor was the copious use of aluminum foil. Everything was sheathed in it. It is used to help insulate the components which are often cooled with nitrogen.

When we got onto the floor out first stop was at a UV line which is managed by SUNY at Stony Brook for a consortium of universities. Today a researcher was there studying the effects of pollution on marine organisms.

The shiny stainless steel pipe crossing horizontally through this image is the actual beam.

It terminates here in the experimental equipment.

It seems like a long way to go to get some light into that little box.

From there the observed data goes through the computers to get over here so the scientists can see those little pictures on their computer screens.

The primary researcher is seated at the Apple laptop in the blue shirt. I guess the woman who manages the line for SUNY has to be cited as a collaborator in his research.

This is a beam that isn’t currently in use. It crosses a corridor so they have to remove a section of it when it is not active. When it is installed people have to go down a flight of steps into a short tunnel to come up on the other side of it. More aluminum foil, this time just to keep the line clean.

Things are pretty similar but different in the x-ray lines. All the lines end in little closets they call hutches, which are heavily shielded.

The area right up against the outside of the hutches us often used as work space.

This is a crystallography experiment inside one of the hutches. The goals are to determine the way proteins are folded and help to understand diseases and to refine the technique for doing this type of research so it becomes more of a turn-key operation.

The stainless tube coming in from the right supplies nitrogen to keep the protein cool. The black tube is a TV camera.

One of the turn-key goals concerns centering the specimen. Since they are using x-rays to study the protein they can’t be in the hutch when the beam is turned on to adjust it so they are working with the camera to try to develop a quick, reliable sample positioning technique.

The x-rays go right through the detector which is in the white box with the 210 painted on it in the first picture, so they have a stack of lead bars piled up behind it labeled beam stop.

Lastly I have some miscellaneous pictures from around the NSLS.

A section of beam.

An electrician’s nightmare. This is when you just run a new wire. The risk of disrupting someone else’s experiment would be too great trying to figure out where the problem is.

Looking between two beams. Work areas all look like wedges with most of the work happening at the far end of the beam where there is the most space between lines.

A couple of views over the lab from an elevated walkway.

This is a very confusing environment and not one that I would find it easy to work in.

More information about Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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Observing Location	TotL
Observational Period	2030-0130 EDT
Atmospheric Conditions	It was hot and humid when I arrived back in The City from Long Island. There was some haze in the air. At the park there weren’t any clouds but the sky wasn’t black either. Peter and I both saw it as having a red tint low on the horizon in both the SE and SW. The temperature cooled off after sunset and became quite comfortable and there was even a light breeze blowing. I think it was around 2230 or 2300 EDT that we started to see streaks of cloud to the north. They never really obstructed anything but some objects came and went all around the sky. Fair Transparency Good Seeing
Instruments	Canon 15x50 IS binocular - Charlie Takahashi 102 refractor - Peter Celestron 10x50 binocular - Kin
Observing Party	Charlie Ridgway Peter Tagatac Kin Lee

Target	Jupiter
Constellation	Vir
Category	Planet
Time	20060714.2045 EDT
Comments	There was one moon out on the left and two on the right. A field star above all made a nice triangle.. I made some photographs of it in twilight and after the sky turned dark.

Target	The Coathanger
Constellation
Category	Asterism
Time	2006.0714.2200 EDT
Comments	It took a couple of attempts but I finally got the Coathanger in the camera field of view and nade a few pictures of it.

Target	NGC6231, Table of Scorpius C76, Baby Scorpion
Constellation	Sco
Category	Deep Sky Objecy
Time	20060714.2208 EDT
Comments	I was searching for the messier objects high in Sco that I never see, and didn't see again tonight, and decided to hop down the constellation and try for the ones near the tail. I got down near the bottom of the constellation and could see ζ1 and ζ2 Sco just above the top of Citicorp Center. Looking a little higher in that FOV I saw a twinkling that came and went. I think I saw five or six stars over time. The seeing was not good enough to see enough of them at once to be able to describe any shape. My impression is that it is a compact cluster of bright stars.

Target	M7, Ptolemy's Cluster, NGC6475
Constellation	Sco
Category	Deep Sky Object
Time	20060714.2320 EDT
Comments	A large and sparse open cluster of bright stars that appears to have bunches of dim stars on the left side.

Target	M6, Butterfly Cluster, NGC6405
Constellation	Sco
Category	Deep Sky Object
Time	20060714.2323 EDT
Comments	A medium size sparse open cluster which looks like a rectangle with a triangle attached to the lower end. All the stars appear fairly bright.

Target	Moon
Constellation
Category	Lunar
Time	2006.0715 0045 EDT
Comments	We were starting to pack up when Peter mentioned that he had wanted to observe the Moon and I said I had wanted to photograph it, but it hadn't crested the trees yet. We decided to relocate to the west side of the lawn for a quick look before packing up. The western rim of Mare Imbrium was white, something I have never noticed if I have seen it before. the inner and outer rims of Mare Nectaris were pointed out by Peter. They are concentric arcs of mountains. The outer rim is Rupes Altai (Grego and Rukl) or the Altais Scarp (Cherrington). Grego describes the scene thusly: Less than ten hours after the evening terminator has eaten Posidonous, sunset takes place over the mighty Theophilous chain in the south. Nearby, Rupes Altai now`casts a broad black shadow onto the plains to its east - an easy target for binoculars, and a wonderful sight at medium magnification through a telescope if the field of view is wide enough also to contain the Theopholus chain. while Cherrington says: Just east of Fermat a conspicuous, black, somewhat irregular line catches the eye. It comes south from a point near tacitus, turns sharlpy to the southeast near Fermat, and continues on to the terminator. That is the Altai Scarp which was prominent as a bright line on the five-day moon. and The Altai Scarp cuts through rugged territory bordering Mare Nectaris, the southwest edge of which is shown beyone Beaumont and Fracastorius [pictures on pages 156 and 157]. The prominent irregular cliff which rises 2 miles high in places and curves northward some 600 miles is part of a vast ring concentric with circular Mare Nectaris. Baldwin has traced it completely except where it is buried under the lavas of other maria. He believes that the shock wave resulting from the impact which excavated the Nectaris basin caused the surface to buckle, break and drop away along the scarp. The floor of Picolomini was in shadow but the central peak stood out white in contrast against it. Lunar Chart 96 by the US Air Force Mare Nectaris is in the upper right corner just outside of Beaumont. Tacitus is in the upper left corner. The Altai Scarp runs in an arc from the upper left to the lower right. Piccolomini is in the lower right corner. The central part of Mare Frigoris was washed out and bareky visible. I made a few photographs of the Moon also.