I'm Boris Heisler.

I am a astronomer at Nottingham University, and I was just on observing trip to Hawaii, and Brady gave me this little camera that I took with me, um, to record whatever I thought was interesting for a general audience and 60 symbols.

And yet this is what we made.

Howard.

It is 1/4 to 4 on 27th of February, and I I'm on my way to the bus to capture plane to Hawaii, where we'll go observing on a telescope, and I will try to take you with me.

So I'm standing in Maine building.

Look around the dormitory.

So this is a picture off through the hotel, basically where you stay as an observer.

It's roughly at 3000 meters above sea level, so it's between the mountains close to the settle road.

It's basically a hotel, but only astronomers stay there, so there's a cruise for the telescopes and night cruise.

The reason it's here, another in the summit is because under summit, it's too high, so you can't really sleep there, so you go down to 3000 meters from 4200 something for me being an astronomer, was all about going, observing, going to telescopes and gathering your data So we don't have labs that we can work in and do experiments.

This is where we go and do the hard work and gather the data and then come back.

And you spend months sitting in front of our computer analyzing the data.

And for me, part of the whole romance about being an observational astronomer was actually going out to use the telescopes in these exotic parts of the world.

I find it exciting.

I find it, you get a really connection with what it is that you're doing.

Um, and you get to travel to these wonderful, exotic places being on top of Monarch A and Hawaii.

It really does feel like you're out of this world.

It's it's it's not like any other place on earth.

In fact, it's more like Mars than anywhere else.

Come to Mama here but to millimeter array.

No idea what that is.

I mean, I, um I think that's a line.

This fuckwit s O.

These are a few images from the actual telescope that I've been using this issue Kurt inside.

So what you see is basically Unfortunately, the mirror is still covered so that it's closed there.

There's west east south north marked on the cover.

So this is where the mirrors and then this black tube in the middle.

It's a very, very long tube with 3.5 meters or something like that.

That's the actual Cameron.

So this is the wide field camera we've been using.

It's an infrared telescope s.

Oh, um, we're using infrared light, which is slightly redder than red.

So this is one of the sunsets from monarchy, and it's really, really beautiful.

It's actually so beautiful that tourists spent roughly $100 or so to take a bus to go up to the summit just to see the sunset.

For us, it's it's actually we're quite lucky because we were allowed, I should say, to go outside, because in principle we should be working at that time, so we start working at five minutes to sunset.

I'm doing some camera calibrations and stuff, but the telescope operated it bat, and Alice and I were allowed to go outside and try the sunset as the sun's setting.

You need to open the dome so that the telescope temperature in the air temperature inside the dome equalizes, you have turbulence.

For me, that was always quite a thrilling part.

I always like to go into the dome itself, um, and actually watched the dome open and feel the whole machinery shake and then maybe peek out and again if if if you're on Mauna Kea A, you can often consider yourself that you're the highest person in the whole Pacific at that moment.

Yeah, that's quite a quite exciting thought.

So this is an image where we actually hiked to the real summit off monarch here, which is just tow 200 meters hike.

Very, very exhausting.

200 meters hike, I should say.

And in this image you see a few telescopes on the right side.

The white bubble that's the C F ht French Canadian telescope than the big silver one is a very famous one.

Its chairman, I.

So that's something I north, to be exact.

There's another one in Chile.

Um, and then it's Hawaiian University telescope and the one on the left side, the one that is open.

I can actually see a bit of the telescope inside, and that's you, Kurt.

So It's a 3.5 meter mirror in there.

It's the biggest infrared telescope on the world.

This is the telescope it we've been using when we were there.

So this is actually quite of a holiday picture that was controlling.

We've been out for the sunset again.

This is a picture that I took roughly when we had an earthquake.

So I personally didn't feel it because I probably just thought it was one of the big bands around us moving.

But Alice felt it when we came back to the telescope, Thought told us that there was an earthquake and we looked up the information, which is the next image.

It's was a 4.4 magnitude earthquake roughly 10 kilometers away from the telescope, so very, very close, and it actually shifted the telescope s o.

The telescope is spilled in the way probably showed up.

It's basically a metal structure that is able to move freely, and it's only held in place by these pistons.

So that's a metal piston that looks like this roughly, and this too off those hold the telescope when, if there's an earthquake, this breaks and this is the actual piston that broken our in our earthquake.

So the telescope was out of place and buy half a millimeter or a millimeter, which, of course, is big enough to screw up our pointing.

So we didn't actually know where the telescope was pointing, so we had to fix that.

So we had a long screw like that size and had to screw that in with a lot of force.

So you can see me working hard, breathing a lot, working hard to actually move the telescope into place.

I was quite happy because, you know, it was very special.

It was also very special because this the earthquake especially it wasn't actual monarchy are earthquake, which are quite rare.

How often can you actually move a telescope?

I thought there was quite exciting.

So this is a picture off, basically the control room.

The telescope is just behind the wall.

The whole telescope is automated so much that you're basically working for two minutes, and then the computer does all the observation.

So you hang around and spend half an hour browsing the web, checking Facebook, writing e mailers.

Oh, it can be very, very boring.

Absolutely.

Um, particularly if you're doing very long exposures if you're doing the same thing over and over again.

Yeah, you can just be sitting there counting the hours down, pressing buttons and drinking coffee and listening to music.

And I was quite lucky on this.

This run, you can actually do some work, so I have my work with me.

Unfortunately, there is 4200 meters high, so it z lack of oxygen.

It's really hard to concentrate on your constantly having a very slight headache.

And you also get quite stupid because there's a lack of oxygen about there.

We build these telescopes to be above as much of the atmosphere is we can for image quality purposes.

But higher we go in the atmosphere, the less oxygen there is for our brains, and so you can find that you not only physically slow down, but it's quite obvious that you mentally slow down as well.

And if something goes wrong, if you're confronted with a problem, you can take ages to fix it.

Whereas you might call down for advice from someone working sea level, and they'll point out the obvious solution straight away.

Observing is, unfortunately, a very small part off.

Most astronomers lives.

I've only been observing three times in seven or eight years now.

So once in southern Spain, and twice and otherwise.

Well, to be honest, I don't get to go observing very much anymore, which makes me a bit sad.

I did most of my observing as a student.

Now, either I get my my time through this service mode where it's done on your behalf, or I use telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope, where you're not really gonna get a chance to go up and press any buttons.

Um, I just walked home through the night, so I didn't actually, which is surprising that I'm actually quite awake.

Quite okay.