[ Monday, February 17, 2003 ]

Snore

A while ago I wrote about my ickiest job. Today I thought I’d write about the most brain numbing job I’ve ever had.  When I tell people that I was once an “astronomer technician”, they are very impressed, every single person.  Obviously they don’t really understand what is involved in this kind of career.

I came to this field of research in a circuitous manner but clearly meeting all the requirements of the position..... hungry for any work during the recession of the mid-1980’s at the same time when my boss, a physics professor, was desperately looking for a warm body with a college degree who would move to the wild remotes of Eastern Oregon.

It didn’t matter that my degree was not even closely related to physics or that my astronomical experience was limited to occasionally glimpsing a shooting star here and there.  I was such a neophyte that I had no idea that constellations actually covered the whole sky and then some....not that constellations are really a part of this kind of research.

So, with nothing at all to justify my hire, I bought an electric blanket, a book called something like ‘Astronomy for Morons’, loaded my VW Bug and drove to Pine Mountain, a very remote location in Eastern Oregon.  The closest neighbor was an old guy who literally owned the little town of Millican, a thriving metropolis that included a tiny store filled with canned goods, a single gas pump and a couple of air stream trailers in the back.  The total population was the fat guy and his big black lab who always carried around a can of dog food in his mouth.  Millican also served as Pine Mountain’s mail stop because the observatory was another 6 miles and 6,500’ up to top of the mountain.

The observatory was actually a facility made up of three buildings, each housing one of the large telescopes, a 15”, a 24” and a 32”.  There was a duplex apartment there, I lived in the larger portion that served as sort of an office and bunk house and the project lead, Mark, lived in the smaller portion with his dog, Snoopy.  Mark was actually a physics grad trained to do his job, so his understanding of astronomy was god-like to me.

Mark was a good person and I enjoyed working with him and I really appreciated his patience in trying to teach me everything I had to know to do the job.  Life as an astronomer technician was interesting as long as I was learning.

However, everything I needed to do, was essentially something a trained monkey could do, well a trained monkey tall enough to look through the telescope site.  Every night, I would trudge through the snow up to the 24” telescope, thaw the lock and climb the steps to the platform.  In those days, the computer was really a card reader that had to be reloaded every night using little keypunched Mylar-like strips that required only that I fed them through the reader, one at a time and in the correct order.

Once it was loaded, I would then set the tracking mechanism on the focal star and wait to see if it was tracking correctly.  Then, I would trudge back down the hill to the warmth of the apartment and wait for 20 minutes before going back up to monitor the tracking....which usually required a tiny adjustment so that the focal star would stay in the crosshairs.  Then back down the hill to thaw a bit, then back up to turn the tracking knob a millimeter or two.  This went on all night long...with a frequently occurring major exception.

The winter that I spent on Pine Mountain was a winter of exceptionally clear weather, which during normal astronomical research is a good thing.  During this winter however, the atmospheric conditions created something called a “cloud cap” over our little bit of the landscape.  The cloud cap is exactly what you must imagine it is....a covering of clouds that covers the tip of a mountain, in our case, the Pine Mountain Observatory. This meant that all research was canned until the winds blew the cap away which could happen at any time.  This meant that I had to stay up all night going out every fifteen minutes to see if it had cleared up yet or not and if it did, start the monkey job again.

It rarely cleared up and I felt stuck in limbo all the time....not able to just bag it and go to bed, not able to do my monkey job.  The cloud cap was the bane of my existence....night after night, it removed any sort of purpose.  I was a slave to the wind and it didn’t take too many nights before THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO!

Monotony was my demon.

I read every single book, journal, periodical and magazine that I could lay my hands on including an entire set of Louis L’Amour westerns.  Cooking was almost impossible there and there is no hiking at night...unless I was willing to risk getting lost or fall off some cliff.

Pine Mountain was far from any sort of entertainment, including cable TV.  This means that we had to rely upon rather poor reception for both TV and radio which diminished when the sun went down.  At its best, our little 13” black and white Sears TV would pull in 1 and 1/3 channels...that would be channel 6 and part of channel 5.  Even if we adjusted the aluminum foil super antenna that we rigged up around the living room, we were never able to eliminate the 1/3 channel that ghosted over channel 6.

The programming on channel 6 had absolutely nothing to do with viewership because if they had cared that there were two people on a lonely mountain hanging on their every garbled word, they certainly would have allowed us more entertainment than just the news and old Phil Donohue tapes. This one channel stopped broadcasting at 1 am and restarted, I dunno when because I was always asleep by then. 

When I look back at the location and the isolation, I feel like I had my own little experience with the Outlook Hotel, just without the ghosts and blood.  I liked the location.  I liked the snow and living so far away from everything but I hated the boredom!  I hated living the nights away by watching the clock and always waiting.  It was really hard and really really DULL.

So, now you know.

Today’s Cool Link:  Pine Mountain Observatory.  Now.  It looks like a much nicer place to wile away the hours....it has a T1 line now!!  Despite my thousands of hours of boredom, I did learn about astronomy.  I read all the journals there and came to develop an interest in astronomy.  If you are ever in Eastern Oregon, drive up there and check it out.