Not my turn in the spotlight

This evening, BBC Television will be broadcasting the first of a three night series called "Stargazing Live". These programs will be shown at 8 pm, on BBC2 and will be hosted by Professor Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain, live from Jodrell Bank.

I haven't seen the Control Room in so much turmoil since we had the film crew from "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy" doing a two day shoot a few years ago. In front of the Control Desk the set design team has built a raised area and a pair of platforms for large, plasma display screens. There are an array of studio lights strung from the ceiling, various microphones in strategic places, lighting control panels, audio mixers and all the miles of cable that go with them.
The rest of the main building is festooned with temporary signs and arrows pointing the way to the Production Office, Makeup, Green Room, Rehearsal Room and Dressing Rooms. Outside the building there's the kind of circus that always accompanies this sort of undertaking.
There's the "Gallery Truck", with an enormous articulated trailer which houses the outside broadcast control room. This appears to be one of those origami vehicles where the walls extend in all directions creating an internal working space that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. It's probably as close as you can get to having an actual TARDIS.
There are lighting trucks, satellite communication vans, catering trucks, a marquee laid out with tables for refreshments, portable toilets, generators, water bowsers, a mobile security post and a bunch of other non-specific vans.

The thing that's difficult to believe is that when I finished my shift yesterday morning, none of this stuff was here. As I walked out of the Control Room, the set designer and his team had just pulled up outside the Main Building.
While I was at home asleep, the place was transformed.

It's just the luck of the draw which of the six controllers gets which shift when this sort of event is on.
I can't decide whether or not to be disappointed that I'm not on-shift for all the fun and games. It's always interesting to be behind the scenes and watch how media stuff works, but it can be quite stressful too. We cannot afford to let the artistic demands of the TV crew influence any operational decisions about the way the telescope is driven. There's always the chance that you'll have to tell the director that he's not going to get his preferred shot of the telescope positioned low to the horizon because the wind is too strong.
As you can imagine, that doesn't go down too well, but it's better than breaking the telescope.

Anyway, if you were hoping to catch a glimpse of me actually working you are going to be out of luck. Your Controller for Monday and Tuesday evening's shows will be Jock, and on Wednesday it will be Andy.

 "We are in control...": Andy and Jock are second and third from the left, respectively.

Apologies to BT: The Speaking Clock is Correct

I'm starting to realise what it's like to be Boris Johnson. This is the second time I've had to publicly apologise in a month.

My previous post, stating that the Speaking Clock was four seconds fast, was not entirely correct. It appears that although the speaking clock messages that I was getting on our telephone system at work have been incorrect, the BT Speaking Clock service is running perfectly.
The most likely culprit for this peculiar problem probably resides somewhere in the telephone system of a third party communications supplier.

Some very helpful comments from one of my long-suffering followers, drew my attention to the fact that our telephone network is no longer a strictly BT operation, so it was quite likely that some third party complication could have nadgered the normally reliable service.
I also had a chat with a chap from The Greenwich Observatory. Although he explained that they are no longer "The Keepers of Time" at Greenwich, his assessment of the problem was in line with Jon's explanation.

Apparently you can effectively buy a speaking clock device for your telephone network. This uses a radio timing signal, broadcast from Anthorn in Cumbria, to keep it locked to the correct time. Unfortunately, if your speaking clock box loses the timing signal, it continues to operate but uses its own internal quartz crystal oscillator to keep on time. If this oscillator isn't running at the right rate, the thing will gradually drift off.

It's plausible that this is what's happened to the rogue speaking clock which I was using.

If it does get sorted out, I'll let you know, but until then,
"At the third stroke, it will be time to make a grovelling apology to BT... PIP...PIP...PIP"

What time is it...?

I'd like to make an appeal to all of you lucky folk who have been wallowing in the luxury of an extra hour in bed, this morning.

Spare a thought for shift workers.

Yes, it's that time of year again, when we "put the clocks back" by an hour, taking us from the balmy days of British Summer Time to the dismal gloom of Greenwich Mean Time.

Why am I asking you to consider those of us that do shift work?

Well, here's the thing.
My colleague who was working the night shift last night, began work at 23:45 and would normally finish at 08:15, eight and a half hours later.
Unfortunately for him, at 02:00, he had to put his watch back to 01:00 and do the hour between 01:00 and 02:00 for a second time. Therefore he was expected to work for nine and a half hours instead.
Obviously, if someone always works night shifts, the situation is reversed in Spring, so they work for an hour less on the shift that the clocks are changed.
Our shift pattern is not fixed, however, so there is no guarantee that the person who wins in the Spring, will be the loser in the Autumn.

To help spread the misery (or joy), all of the Jodrell Bank Telescope Controllers have a "Gentleman's Agreement" to split these problematic hours between the two people working the Night Shift and the Day Shift.

It ought to have been simple enough, you'd think.
All I had to do was, get to work in time to let my colleague go home after he had done an extra half hour. It should have been especially easy as I actually didn't have to arrive at work until half an hour later than usual, even though the clock would show it as half an hour earlier.
The trouble was, that a few years ago I had the same set of circumstances and I got it hopelessly wrong.
A miscalculation with the time I was expected to get to work, combined with a mistake setting my alarm clock (a particularly smart model, which automatically resets itself to the correct time by picking up radio signals from an atomic clock somewhere) and the net result was that arrived at work one and a half hours early.
I really didn't want to witness for a second time, the complex and infuriating mixture of glee and pity that passed across my colleague's face when he realized what I'd managed to do.

This time it would be different..
I'd set the clock correctly. I knew when I was supposed to get up. I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Blight of-my-life had double-checked the calculations. There was no way I was going to get caught out again.

Unfortunately, the brilliantly hi-tech radio-linked, bloody clock failed to pick up the radio signal that should have told it to change to GMT, and it woke me up an hour earlier than I'd intended, at five o'clock.

Next time I need to work out what time it is, I shall ask a man (and I use the term in its loosest sense) who knows.

Ready when you are, Eccles...

Rarer than a Solar Eclipse

I quite often have to remind people that I am not an astronomer.
This is probably a less familiar disclaimer than "I am not a lawyer..." or "I am not a doctor...", but it is something that I need to say every so often, because there is a reasonable expectation that somebody who sits at the controls of the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank must be an astronomer.
It may surprise you, but employing an astronomer as a Controller to operate the Lovell Radio Telescope has traditionally been discouraged.
The reasoning behind this seemingly bizarre policy, is that you want the people who are operating the telescope to be focussed on the wellbeing of the instrument rather than the research that is being carried out.
For example. Someone who is keen to complete a particular astronomical observation might be reluctant to stop observing even though the strength of the wind has risen to a point where the structure could suffer irreperable damage.

In spite of not being an astronomer I do need to know some astronomy and so I have to refer to "The Astronomical Almanac". This is published each year and contains a vast array of data concerning the behaviour of the Sun, Moon, the Planets and Pluto, as well as coordinates of many different types of stars and galaxies.
Amongst the phenomena that are listed are any eclipses of the Sun or Moon and where they can be observed on the Earth's surface. I used to think that solar eclipses were pretty unusual but since I started working as a Telescope Controller, I've discovered that they happen comparatively often. Two years ago there were two total eclipses of the Sun, last year there was one, and if you were on The Cook Islands, Polynesia or the southern tip of South America just over a week ago you would have been ideally place to experience the phenomenon.

Something that is far rarer than an eclipse is getting all six Telescope Controllers together at the same time. For safe operation of our telescopes it is essential that there is always a Controller on duty, for every hour of every day of the year. This, of course means that on any day, three Controllers will be covering the eight hour shifts while the remaining three will be on rest days or on leave.

In the ten years that I've been doing the job I had never seen more than four Controllers in the same room at the same time, but last Thursday we finally managed to get the full set.

...and here's the proof.
 

They said it couldn't be done... 

What lies beneath

I reckon that there's always something intriguing about the stuff that lurks behind the scenes at any workplace. I suppose that this may be one of the reasons why fly-on-the-wall documentaries are so popular.
What self-respecting nosey so-and-so wouldn't want to get a sneaky peek at the inner workings of an aircraft carrier or the back-stage business at a major theatre.

When I was a very small boy I was fascinated by those small doors that could be seen in wooden hoardings that surrounded building sites. Trailing along behind my Mum on a trip to the shops, I always wanted to linger in the hope of catching a glimpse of the exciting things that were going on behind those blank plywood facades. Occasionally these doors would be tantalisingly open and the wonderland could be seen. Cement mixers, piles of bricks, pneumatic drills and all the other paraphernalia of construction were briefly fully revealed.

I hadn't realized just how much I had been captivated by the mystery of what lay behind the door to the World of The Building Site until one day, nearly twenty years later, I actually stepped through one such door.
I was working on the redevelopment of the shopping centre in the middle of Stratford on Avon and my mates and I had just been for breakfast at "The Hatch" Cafe. As we clumped along Wood Street in our cement-crusted boots, up to the blank blue door, I noticed that we were being watched by a small boy, as his mother hurried him along the pavement. It was like travelling back in time and seeing myself. I could imagine him thinking, "I wish I could go through that door..."
I've never really had any grand scheme or a life plan, but at that moment I knew that I'd fulfilled some kind of ambition.

It's probably just as well that I've never had a Life Plan, because there is no way that I would have ended up doing my present job if I'd tried to follow any sensible career strategy. I think I just got very lucky
So here's a special behind the scenes picture of a part of Jodrell Bank that not too many people get to see.

This is the tunnel that runs from the Basement of the Main Building to the Annular Lab, under the Lovell Telescope. It lies beneath the concrete path you can see leading away from the foreground of the picture at the top of this post.

This tunnel is the main service duct for cables that supply electrical power for the telescope motors and the many control and data feeds that run from the receivers to the instrument racks in the Observing Room. It also provides a convenient subterranean route for our staff to get to the telescope structure.

One of the best things about this tunnel is that it wouldn't look out of place in many computer games.
Anybody who has played "Half Life 2" or "Deus Ex" will know what I'm on about.
It's also the kind of location that you find in the sort of film where someone always says, "I'll just go down and check the tunnel...", shortly before dying horribly.

If zombies ever invade Jodrell Bank, I know where they'll be coming in...

Rising to the challenge

Guess what...

We've just got our first Christmas card.

Greeting Reads: Merry Christmas for 2010 from Ray & Angie (Beat this Cousin Maureen)

OK, a bit of explanation is required.

At the tail end of the 1970s (Yes, it's that decade again) I was driving a van for a living, delivering industrial fastenings across Devon. From a small warehouse on the edge of Dartmoor, I distributed nuts, bolts, washers and screws to factories, shops, building sites and boat yards across much of the South-West tip of the country.
I even had to make deliveries inside Dartmoor Prison. You can probably imagine how amused the prison warders were when I arrived and they asked me what I was delivering and I replied, "Screws..."

It was a really enjoyable job. As is so often the case, it was the people that made all the difference. Even if it had been a difficult day out on the road, simply getting back to the depot and getting the van loaded for the following day was almost always good fun thanks to the warehouse guys in general and Ray, the warehouse manager, in particular.
Even after all the years since I left Devon, we're still in touch. Each Christmas, the first card to arrive generally has a Devon postmark and our address written in Ray's distinctive, looping handwriting. 2009 was one of the rare years when somebody elses card put Ray and Angie into second place. When I sent our card, I mentioned that my cousin Maureen had pipped them at the post and it seems to have touched a competitive nerve. Clearly, second place is not an option.

Hopefully things will calm down now.

...as long as Maureen doesn't decide to put in a pre-emptive strike for Christmas 2011.

The view from my window

I was talking to one of my brothers the other evening, on the 'phone, and he asked me,
"Just how high off the ground are you in the telescope control room?"
When I told him that the Control Room is in a building at ground level, and not actually on the telescope itself, he seemed quite disappointed.
If he'd been the first person to ask this question, I might have been tempted to give him a hard time, but it's not uncommon for people to think that we drive the telescope from a control cabin, perched high up on the structure like the operator of a building-site tower crane.

The working environment is a lot less spartan than that and although the view from the Control Room windows is dominated by the dish, we are a couple of hundred metres away from it.

In the Google-map view below, you can see the Control Building down and to the right of the Lovell Telescope, at the end of the straight path.


View Larger Map

For any astronomers out there, the position of the dish in the Google image would be typical for pulsar observations; generally South and close to the horizon.

Sometimes you just get lucky

The weather was pretty miserable here yesterday; no sun at all, 10mm of rain and horrible squally winds. When you get a duff day like that, it makes you appreciate it when you have one like today.
OK, it is December in Northern England, so you can't expect miracles, but at about 8:30 this morning, when I was scheduling a run of pulsar observations, the low winter sunlight striking the Lovell Telescope looked lovely.

Then I noticed the vapour-trail...

I'm really glad I had my camera with me.

Hello Swindon!!

I'd sort of forgotten about Swindon.

I've only ever been there a few times and unless I'm very much mistaken it's probably more than thirty years since my last visit, so when I noticed that someone in Swindon has been visiting this blog, a memory surfaced from the deep and I started thinking...

[Insert arty dissolve and descending harp music]

It is the nineteen-seventies, I've got lots of hair and I'm driving a white, twin-wheel Ford Transit van for Home Delivery Services. It's the first proper job I've had for quite a while.
In the few years between leaving school and this point in my life, I've spent a year at Salford University discovering that I'm not suited to becoming a civil engineer, I've dropped out and taken labouring jobs on building sites, been a self-employed steel-fixer and shuttering carpenter, and I've abandoned my dream of being a road-manager with a progressive rock super-group.
I've shared a flat with friends, been evicted, moved back home to my parents, left home again to live with a band of friends in a cottage in the middle of an orchard. Now, I am sharing another house with another couple of friends on the outskirts of Bristol.
It is a relatively calm point in an otherwise turbulent part of my life.

The job is not ideal, but it is a driving job. More importantly, it is a reasonably well-paid driving job. HDS is the Littlewoods organisation's own company, set up to distribute their vast quantity of mail-order goods to their catalogue agents across the UK. This is an idea that will be copied by many other firms over the years, breaking the virtual monopoly of the Post Office and spawning a new archetypal road user; "White Van Man".

I have lucked into this job a couple of weeks after a mate of mine has been taken on. A fellow roadie and refugee from the implosion of the prog-rock band, he had seen the advert at the local Job Centre and had already completed his on the job training and been allocated his own van and delivery area. From his description, it sounded pretty good; OK, it was multi-drop, house to house deliveries, but the basic pay was better than average, and with the thinly disguised bonus scheme, it was possible to earn quite a bit more than basic. When he told me they were looking for more drivers, I was swiftly down to the Job Centre and after a quick interview and a driving test, I was in!!

The first few weeks at HDS have been an eye-opener. There are a couple of dozen drivers, including the usual old lags, the boy racers, several women and an airline pilot. Most of the drivers seem OK, although the women are pretty scary; equal pay for women is not yet a universally accepted concept, and having landed a job in one of the few companies that doesn't discriminate, these women seem to be tougher than the blokes. Ellen Ripley from 'Alien' would have blended in perfectly.
I am trained by one of the women. Raddy is a hard-core delivery driver; she's been with the firm long enough to have worked out most of the angles, and over the course of two days she explains how the job is supposed to be done, whilst demonstrating how this differs from the actuality of driving a hundred miles and making over a hundred deliveries in about five hours.
"We're supposed to get a signature for every delivery, but they know it's impossible. If you can get half of them signed you'll be OK. Learn which neighbours are in and where to stick parcels if there's nobody at home."
"OK"
"Don't forge signatures "
"What, not even to make up the numbers?"
"No. If stuff goes missing when you left it in the shed or somewhere, they'll get pissed off, but if you've faked a signature, they'll say you've nicked it. It's not bloody worth it. They'll still moan about 'too many Not Signed For', but sod 'em."
"Right."
As she explains all this, Raddy hurtles across the suburbs. We barrel down every single road in Fishponds, screeching to a halt and bundling out of the van with armfuls of anonymous brown parcels. Her knowledge of the area is astonishing; not just where every road, lane and cul-de-sac is, but where the individual houses are on those streets.
We only stop the engine once, while we have a quick snack for lunch and she explains about the 'Safe Driving Bonus'
"We get a bonus each month if we don't have an accident, and there's another bonus if you can do a whole year without crashing."
"Do you usually get the bonus?"
"Yes... usually. So when I let you drive, don't bloody hit anything."
"Er, OK"
"This is worth having though,", she pauses, and reaches into her handbag. She takes out a can of White Duplicolour aerosol touch-up paint and laughs "Oh yeah, I usually get the bonus..."

So, the weeks roll by, and while waiting for a regular delivery area to become available, I spend my days covering routes for the drivers who are off sick or on holiday. One morning as I head into Swindon, I see an extraordinary road sign. At first glance it looks like a normal roundabout, but as I get closer it looks more like a pentagon with five dots in it,
"What the...?"
Before I have enough time to work out what it might mean, I'm driving into a maelstrom of vehicles. There is an expanse of nearly featureless tarmac, with cars and trucks and buses driving in all directions. I drive tentatively into this mayhem, aim in the general direction of where I think my exit is, and give way to any vehicle that approaches from my right, looks bigger than my van or else seems determined to collide with me.
Miraculously, I emerge on the other side of this extraordinary piece of traffic engineering with my van unscathed and my underwear unsoiled.

I am delighted to report that this masterpiece is still there, and is now officially named "The Magic Roundabout", in homage to the childrens TV show of the same name. It looks as if the original free-for-all aspect of it has been slightly moderated by adding more road markings and raised areas of tarmac, but it's still totally bonkers.

If you want see how it looks from the air, the satellite view is here.

Thank you Swindon.

"The sun has got his hat on..."

This lovely looking thing is a Campbell Stokes pattern sunshine recorder. It focusses the light (and heat) of the sun through the spherical glass lens, onto a special strip of card. The card is scorched but does not burst into flames, leaving a burnt track that records the duration and intensity of the sunshine.

One of my tasks during a Day Shift, is to collect meteorology data, and changing the sun chart is part of this routine.

I was particularly pleased today, because it was the first Equinoctial Card of the year. There are three different types of card; one for winter when the sun is low in the sky, one for summer when it is at it's highest and an equinoctial card for spring and autumn.

The arrival of the spring, equinoctial card signals the part of the year when the length of days increases at the fastest rate. This always makes me feel good, because it means that soon it'll be summer, and that even Night Shifts will have quite a bit of daylight.

I mentioned this to my Guv'nor today, and he said, "Most people get that feeling when they see the daffodils coming out."

Anyone would think that there's something strange about the sight of scorched cardboard raising ones spirit

.

I love this job!

Here's one of the things that make my job absolutely brilliant. It's the view from what you might call "my office window" at Jodrell Bank. It is, of course, the Lovell Telescope; this is what I drive for a living.

The picture was taken today, shortly after ten to four in the morning. I was coming up to the half-way point in my eight hour shift. I'd got a nice efficient set of pulsar observations scheduled, the wind was very light and although there was a reasonable amount of snow on the ground, none was falling, so everything was pretty much optimal. 

We don't normally run a lot of lights on the telescope because of the light pollution, but it's a good idea to occasionally test run the security floods. 

When I switched them on, I was so chuffed with how the structure looked, with the Moon peering over the shoulder of Red Tower, I just had to get a photo'.