When doing observations, it sometimes happens that things just won’t collaborate, one way or the other, making it impossible to get any good data. This is true for all areas of astronomy, where you can have clouds, high water vapor, light pollution, radio frequency interference or equipment malfunction of various sorts. Sometimes the reasons for not getting observations are tricky, but in other cases they are fairly obvious… Or so you would think.

Doing a pulsar survey one night at the Parkes Observatory, an undergrad student observer doesn’t seem to be getting any good data from the 64m radio telescope. In fact, he’s not even getting bad data, he’s getting no data at all. As much as it is annoying getting bad data, getting zero data is just immensely frustrating. The bad data would at least get you something that could potentially be useful. But having gone through all the planning and work associated with observations, for zero gain, is just painful.

After long hours that no doubt involved pulling out hairs and being frustrated, the relief, which happens to be the supervisor of the undergrad student, enters the observing tower at 4am. He’d apparently been keeping an eye out for things on the ground on the way there, as he had found a receiver lying on the ground outside. His immediate reaction was along the lines of “Huh, I wonder what that’s doing here? I better pick that up and bring it in with me.” The receiver was then brought to the control room, after which the supervisor continued to try and get some observations going, with very limited success.

At sunrise, one of the staff members arrive, to meet what was no doubt a very frustrated astronomer, who had not gotten any useful data at all that night. Upon seeing the receiver in the control room, he casually pointed out that there was a very nice receiver-shaped hole in the radio dish. In fact, it looked suspiciously like the receiver the supervisor had picked up during the night, would fit exactly there. Which of course provided an immediate explanation as to why no data was received. One can only wonder, why this had not come to mind earlier. I suppose it’s like when you are looking for your glasses while already wearing them. You just don’t see what’s right in front of you.

The Parkes Radio Telescope from the air. Credit: Shaun Amy, CSIRO

Apparently, the receiver had recently been changed, and whoever was putting the receiver in, had not tightened the bolts sufficiently, so as the telescope was turning, the receiver had gotten loose and fallen to the ground. I suppose that the lesson here is: If you find a fairly essential piece of your instrument in a weird place, that might be a good place to start, when trying to figure out why nothing is working. In addition to that, some safety advice; Always wear a hard hat when observing. Even if in the middle of nowhere, with no tall things around, you never know what might hit you.