Dear friends,
I am thrilled to report another successful observing run at the Green Bank Telescope on May 13, 2023. We observed over 1000 additional stars and their planetary systems with 16 pairs of scans. Everything went smoothly and our timing was quasi-optimal, with just 30 seconds to spare before handing the telescope over to the next observer. It was great to see that the two-bit sampling mode that we have been using for the past 7 years is now accessible from the Astronomer's Integrated Desktop (Astrid), a development that we owe to our telescope friend and collaborator Ryan Lynch. In this mode, we recover 88% of the power of a perfectly sampled signal and benefit from reduced data storage requirements. UCLA graduate student Megan Li promptly processed the data, which we will upload to our citizen science platform soon.
Also on May 13, I had the great pleasure of participating as a speaker and panelist at Alien Night!, an event at Wildwood School in Santa Monica. The guest of honor was Dr. Seth Shostak from the SETI Institute, whose SETI career and sense of humor are both legendary. The questions from students, parents, educators, and conspiracy theorists were really fun and interesting. I have been invited to speak at Wildwood School again shortly before the upcoming annular eclipse on the morning of Saturday, October 14, 2023. Although Los Angeles is not in the path of the annular eclipse, the partial eclipse will be substantial here, with the Moon obscuring 70% of the surface of the Sun.
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