But I will now also speak to you about my time at the Moletai research school. Early sunday morning, the 10th of August, the four of us travelling from Lund met up at the train station in Lund to travel to the airport in Copenhagen. The flight then to Vilnius, Lithuania, was the third all in all of my life that I've had flown with an airplane. Pretty scary statistics I guess for a 23 year old guy, but I will try and make up for that now afterwards instead, before my life is filled with work (and hopefully love and compassion as well). But we arrived at the research school some hours later, and there was nothing on the schedule at that time so me and Carina scouted the surroundings a little. With time more and more people arrived, and in the evening we had a reception at the roof of the institution. Eventually I met my room mate, Eirik from Norway. A little morning-tired but a fun guy nevertheless. There were two rooms at the top floor of the house we stayed in, the other room was occupied by carina as a norwegian woman. Us for at the top floor had a great load of fun together on all meal discussions, really loads of fun. And it was nice being able to speak swedish once in a while( and not being understood by a majority of the others).
What I can remark about the observatory site is that they had a indoor pool and a sauna in the basement which we both used a lot of evenings. It was a nice way to spend the evenings the days we didn't have any observations, with chatting and relaxing. If the weather allowed it we also had lots of water to dive down into around us, although not all of them were that pleasant to swim in. Otherwise there was woods, woods and more woods mostly except for some few cows and horses tied to poles close-by.
But on money it all started. We were divided into groups of two and together did our observations so. Some groups had bad luck with weather and other circumstances which resulted in bad or even no measurements, while some, as was the case for my group, had several good nights of measurements. On the first weekend we were given some time from studies and we had the saturday (NB: on the friday we still had observations) to walk around in bigger groups looking for parts of a picture spread along a designated route. That day was one of the hotter days that we spent there, it was probably more effective than the sauna haha. On the evening then we were given lots of nice food and listened to some folklore from Lithuania along with folkdancing. Interesting, and I think I did fairly good for someone born with three left-foots. My feet ARE made for walking, not dancing. After this evening, which really was a blast, we went to Vilnius on the sunday and were guided around and ate a nice fancy dinner at a restaurant, followed by some free time to spend as we pleased in Vilnius.
On the following monday we had more observations until thursday when all observations for all groups were finished, although not succesful as previously mentioned, and we were to begin working on our Large Assignements. As the dynamical astronomy freak I am, I was pretty fond of the topic Eclipsing binaries, although the assignement had very little to do with dynamics. I worked together with a danish student named Thomas on this, and he was in one of the few groups that had gotten no real scientific measurements during the school so far. And it seemed his bad luck affected us in this as well. With one of the binary systems we observed we had so bad luck that the two measurement points we had were taken almost exactly at the same phase; the system rotates around its center-of-mass, and the measurements were almost taken at the same stage of this. For the ~7h period of the system, the phase was coincided within ~2min! Talk about bad luck eh?! But luckily we managed to analyze and attain both radial velocities (although not absolute max value as we are not certain of the phase of the components) and the minimum mass. We got values from it, and a really nice presentation I might say also. Saturday we all presented our results of our large assignements in the morning, and after this we were all finally free from studying. After this we had a big (and by big I really mean big!) farewell party. There was dancing, eating, drinking and fun games. It was the best party I'd been in for a very long time, and it was so wonderful. Too bad it had to be at the last day of the school, but it wasn't the only party we'd had still just that it was so much bigger and cooler than the others in comparison.
In the end, it was sad to say goodbye to everyone you'd got to know so well in the past days, but we all went home on sunday the 24th. I'll let the impression of how much fun we've had be enhanced by this following pictures.
One lovely sunset on our the night of the second tuesday of our stay. Lovely ain't it, and taken using my own crapbox of a camera!
A big fraction of the people from the school, here with Vilnius in the background. Ah such memories!
The forces of nature show their immense power on the night me and Eduardes did our remove observations at the NOT observatory (La Palma, Spain). Some higher power possibly tried to interfere with our measurements, but we stood our ground, never left our seats and won the fight. We got our measurements, pretty much painless and it was an incredible experience.
Last but not least, in gratitude for the paparazzis Gintaras and Vitalii that sometimes really could make a habit of being annoying, but nevertheless took a great bunch of pictures and shared them with us. Giving us a big load of memories, viewable in an eternal digital form. Thank you guys!Now, all that is left is the start of the new term. On monday we have our introduction meeting for the master programme. But the new students at the physics institute does as well, and on the morning I will welcome them along with Carina on behalf of ALVA and hopefully be able to grab some more members to our assocation. On wednesday it's Alva's name day and that we will celebrate with an awesome barbeque party in the evening! But before that it's sunday, and I have to try and get a program working so I can analyze more of the data of the binary systems we attained. Me and Thomas are gonna write an article which will later be published in a preceeding of the research school. My first publication in short! We have also planned to, and I sure hope we will at least try to, apply for observation time at NOT for more phases of the systems we have analyzed in this large assignement. That is, my first own observation application (and maybe also first true observation time, obtained by myself). Lots of things to do, less and less time to do it in.
