Yesterday was Ev’s first day at the Observatory. She has a huge (many pages) checklist of things she needs to learn, along with some books on Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Radio Astronomy to read.

She got a tour of the underside of the dish, including the control mechanism that keep the hanging platform level–it’s gigantic, yet they are able to keep it within 2mm of accuracy! (It uses lasers to constantly monitor the height at the three connection points.)

Today she goes up to the platform and checks out all the receivers/transmitters up there. One of the rooms is called the “grease room” because a lot of equipment uses oil as an inductor. She’s got overalls, steel toe boots, and a hardhat, too–I need to get a picture of that.

I’ll ask her to do a full write-up of her adventures, but it probably won’t happen until this weekend.

As for me, I’m working around the farm mostly. We re-framed a wall of the barn yesterday and will be putting up a fence (for the cows) today or tomorrow. Once the fence is done we’ll be able to put the cows in the back at night (right now they get put into a “garage” area in front of the house, but they crap a lot, so it stinks). We took some pics yesterday, which I’ll post shortly.