CREDIT: KELLY FAST/NASA/GSFC
SAME FREQUENCY. A musical parody of the trials and tribulations of working astronomers has become a hit on YouTube.
Taking a break last year from observation runs at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, astronomer and flamenco guitarist Juan Delgado (front, right) began playing "Hotel California"--the Eagles' rock anthem from the 1970s. The moment inspired Kelly Fast (front, left) and her colleagues from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to describe in verse what it's like working at a high-altitude observatory, testing an instrument designed to study the atmospheres of Mars and Venus. "The baseline is drifting / The spectrum looks weird / Are those emission lines? / What's this dip over here?" Fast croons in the video as her frustrated colleagues point at spectrographic data.
"Hotel Mauna Kea" has been viewed more than 10,000 times on YouTube since its posting on 20 November. "It captures in a humorous way the trials and tribulations of observing, especially when one has built an instrument and is struggling to get data," says Alan Tokunaga, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Fast says her group has some more songs up its sleeve, so stay tuned.
