The real beauty and the beast

This is Ron, and I am back from the Kachkar mountain - Turkey.

I was in a 2 week trek, with 12 good friends from the army. The trail itself starts at a small pastorally village called Ayder. We slept there in our tents, in the middle of the village, on a great grassy slope. On the second day we walked up 1.5 kilometer - a mile up-hill, from an altitude of 1200m to 2700m. From 3600 feet to 8100 feet (I sure hope my math is good). Then we passed Avisor, a small (about 40 people leave there), and from there to a mountain pass on the next day. The passing of the mountains should be easier, but we went the wrong way - and this is what we had to do :

in the picture is me, with Gulu (lake, in Turks)- the bravest dog in Turkey. He walked with us from Ayder, and in the mountain pass, when we descended, he couldn't go down, so I made him a harness from a field mattress (MIZRON SHETAH - who-ever wants to translate that) and ropes. After the part of giant boulders and narrow passing, we had 40 meters of icy-snowy slope do go down, with a rope, one-by-one. With 13 people, it takes about 4 hours. So, instead of eating breakfast in the gulu after the mountain pass, we had there the next day's breakfast.

From this point on the trip was rather usual - we didn't have such crazy things to do. We did reach the summit of the kachkar, at 3962 meters high:

upper left, clockwise: Ron(bent down), Regev, Alex, Iftah, Izhar, Yeara, Gadi(in the middle), Tom, Nir, Avigaile and Efrat. Evyatar and Inbal stayed down.

In the trip we had 4-5 cameras, non of which are mine, so I don't have more pictures at the moment. When I will have I will be happy to place them somewhere on the web. I will be more than delighted if someone (Keren) would help me with that.

At the end of the trip we got 2 days of relay Turkish weather - foggy, that one can't see 10 steps ahead, followed by rain. Cold and dark. The village looked like "lower ankton" (from married with children). So we even got to enjoy the real weather, and it's a good thing we got it at the end - nice and cold before returning to the sauna here in Israel.

Questions? I have the answers.

P.S. about Gulu - we found a group of 4 Israelis, who went back to Ayder, so we joined (with a heartbreak) Gulu to them, and added a note - my name is Gulu, I come from Ayder. He is a brave dog - I bet he managed.

Theche kure - thank you.

Ron

Pop quiz

Who is in the picture?

a) Hammas terrorist hugging an innocent child
b) Bigfoot
c) Homer Simpson, 5 minutes after daily shave
d) Beauty and the beast

Shiny New PhD

This is what a newly-minted, freshly qualified, still sober PhD in Astrophysics looks like. I think he was happy and I know he hadn't had more than one beer at this point. I make no claims for the level of his sobriety a few hours later. You'll have to ask Keren about that.

Oktoberfest

NEW!!

Hi all, the pictures are Here!
Enjoy!!




(I couldn't find enough photos of Megan and Kevin. If you have more photos you want to include, plesas send to my email.
Another thing you can (and should!) help with, is photo captions. Just send me and i'll put them there.)

-keren

לבקשת הקהל...

Mount Palomar

As promised, a bit about my visit to Palomar.
This time, I did more than the guided tour - actually went there for a scientific observation. The Mt. Palomar observatory is the "back yard" telescope of Caltech. It's a couple hours drive, the road going by a few Indian reservoirs, which are the only legal places in California where you can onen a Casino. When we stopped for gas, some weird guy started talking to me, and said that he just came back from the casino... when i asked him if he won anything, he said "to tell ya the truth, um broke. today, i didn't bet a dime. you pay $13 on the bus, and then they give you $25 when you get to the casino. so today i made 8 bucks"
anyway, that's beside the story...


The 200" dome at Palomar

This is the "inside" of the dome.. i didn't take this picture myself, actually it's a picture of a picture that's hanging in the kitchen in the "monestary" - where the observers sleep and enjoy the quiet (see below). i believe this picture was taken using a long exposure, while the dome rotated and the lights inside were on. isn't it cool?

it's actually really hard to take a picture of such a large telescope. there's just not enough space inside the dome to back up and catch the entire monster in your field of view...
this is my attempt at a panoramic image, inside the dome. the curvy beams are actually straight, and this fish-eye effect of the panoramic photography makes them look curved...


This is a HUGE telescope. a few details, the telescope weighs 140 tons, the 200" mirror weighs 14 tons. the dome is 42 meters wide, and weighs about a thousand (1000!!) tons. the reason this dome is so large, is that this telescope is probably the largest one that's "alt-azimuth" - one axis of it points exactly to the north - this is the horse-shoe part - making it easier for it to follow the sky and correct the effect of earth moving around. this way, it needs to move only in one direction during the exposure. other large telescopes, don't point to the north, and need a computer to calculate the small adjustments they need to take all the time in order to follow the sky. with today's computer, this is not a problem, of course. i think it's just awesome though.



this is the view from the "cat walk", the other dome you see over there is (i think) the "small" 60" telescope, also a part of the observatory.



and this is the monestary, where observers sleep, eat and enjoy the peace and quiet. dinner is served every night at 6pm sharp. traditionally - all the pbservers from all the domes are supposet to report exactly on time. practically, all the domes are now operated remotely... so dinner is mostly for the observers at the 200".

A Quiet Weekend in Canada

Gary and Matt and Erin and I just spent a nice quiet weekend in Canada, hiking, swimming and snorkeling. Some of us snorkled. Some of us learned the meaning of th verb "to bonk" and will never go hiking again without eating first. Matt and Erin had to go home on Sunday, so after we saw them off, Gary and I wandered over to the neighbors house, where a post-wedding party
was just getting cranked up.
The gentleman pictured above is Bob, father of the groom. The hat was supposed to keep the sun off his head, but I think he just liked it. He looks like a nice harmless fellow, doesn't he? Don't let the looks fool you. People like Bob are the reason that William Wallace and Robert the Bruce were able to drive the British out of Scotland. I spent quite a while talking with him and I learned lots of things about Scotland and the Royal Air Force which are probably mostly lies, but entertaining nonetheless. He was charming and witty and was able to say the most outrageous things in the driest tone I've ever heard. Gary and I liked him a lot.

At left is the band they hired for the occasion. Well, not really. That's Gary at left and some other very nice folks whose names we can't remember playing the mandolin, guitar, and hammered dulcimer. The music started around 6:00 pm and went on into the wee hours, with the musicians coming and going and the songs getting weirder and weirder. There were banjos, guitars, harmonicas, one sad Irish whistle, and even a highland bagpipe at one point. All we were missing was Matt and his ukulele.



Here you see Graham, the groom, and his good friend Stewart (or Stewed, as the case may be) who are reportedly international drinking champions, Scotch division, and are not allowed to spend time with Gary unsupervised. Graham is a very nice fellow and did not even get upset when a guy from Toronto miscalculated and threw a stick for Grady into the lake and almost hit him in the head. And when he turned to see who was throwing sticks at him and saw about 38kg of Labrador Retriever charging through the water at him at top speed, the look of confusion and terror on his face earned a round of applause from the folks on shore. He made no attempt to throw the stick back at the guy from Toronto so I think he will fit in nicely with the Canadians.
Incidentally, both Graham and Stewart were initiated into the Lumberjack Brotherhood during the wee hours of Monday morning and went home with a few stubby socks as souvenirs. ( Ask Ben.)
All in all, we learned that the Scots are a violent and rowdy race and we wish we could spend more time with them. Graham and Crystal also had friends from England, Germany, Russia, Sweden and who-knows-where-else attending and they were all delightful.

I guess this is why we love going to Canada so much.