In other news, our group now has a terabyte of extra storage space, in the form of two 500GB external hard drives. The intention is that one is to remain in our office as a backup drive, and the other is to be taken along on oberving runs. At roughly the size of a good book (like James Gleick’s Chaos), they’re suitably portable, and much more convenient than burning dozens of DVDs — a 5 night observing run, generating 10 gigs of data per night makes DVDs… unwieldy.

They’re named Eagle and Eskimo — after nebulae. Here’s hoping that offloading some of the archived (read: fairly useless to everyone who’s currently working here) data from the hard drive of this computer might help improve it’s performance somewhat!