All Night Long

One of the unique skills necessary to be a good observational astronomer is that you have to be able to switch from a normal diurnal schedule to a nocturnal one and back, almost at will. It may (or may not) seem obvious to people, but if you are a typical observer your time on the telescope is at night. Your "day" starts at maybe 5 pm (around sunset) and you work until sunrise. But let's be honest, this is rarely after having given yourself a week to slowly adjust your internal clock to a night schedule. If you have a night of observing coming up, you usually work most of the day, maybe go disco nap for a few hours right before your observing run starts, and then power through all night until the sun comes up. Astronomers are somewhat of a rare breed in this way.

Anyway, I find myself this morning at an observatory having just finished my first night of five full nights of observing. A little background: I have spent the last year and a half as part of a team at my university who built a new infrared camera for use at our telescope. The camera is now completed and it was brought to the observatory last weekend. I drove here yesterday (11 hour drive) and arrived just in time to unpack my suitcase, grab a caffeinated beverage, and start our first night of observing. I thought I would be ok staying up all night. I was wrong.

I used to be able to pull all-nighters in college all the time. I'm not saying it was easy, but I recovered from it quite quickly with no adverse after-effects. That skill has clearly left me. Apparently 24 hours with no sleep is now my hard limit. I got up yesterday at 4 am to pack the car and leave on the drive from hell to the observatory and by about 4:15 this morning, after 11 hours of a little bit of observing and a lot of cloud watching, I was done. I just shut down and could barely keep my eyes open. Luckily, I am one of 7 observers down here right now for this project so they didn't really miss me, but wow. There was nothing I could do. When my body was done being awake, it was just done. No argument, no negotiations, I was going to sleep, no matter where I was. Luckily I have four more nights here to try to redeem myself, so perhaps by the end I will be on a comfortable nocturnal schedule and will make it through the whole observing night. Just in time to drive back home and hop on a plane for Thanksgiving. :)