holybikinisbatman:

phantomrose96:

contrabassmellotron:

phantomrose96:

A friend of mine is taking an astronomy class, and she was telling me about some of the impressively large telescopes that exist throughout the world. These are the sorts of things that cost hundreds-of-millions, sometimes billions of dollars, and see into the deepest, farthest, most distant recesses of space, beyond anything even conceivable in human imagination.

And of course, for projects that take many years, hundreds of people, and billions of dollars, that broaden the entire realm of human understanding, the telescopes need names. And no one tops astronomers at naming.

Ask yourself, what should one call a very large telescope? Something cool? Something unique? Something meaningful. Well ask no more, as astronomers have solved that problem. Allow me to introduce you to the 

Brilliant. Beautiful. Send it to the presses Jim. But wait! What about a telescope that’s even larger! Worry not Jim, as we’ve got that covered:

Of course. Exceptional. Elegant. But wait! What if there’s one even larg–

TL:DR Someone……please help the astronomers. 

I’m on mobile but https://xkcd.com/1294/

the xkcd link:

xkcd understands

ok so story time because i absolutely cannot keep my mouth shut about this!

i work for a lab at my school which happens to be an astrophysics lab, and we work with gamma rays on the order of over 100 TeV. we call this VHEGRP or Very High Energy Gamma Ray Physics. The group I work for? VERITAS, or the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System.

but that’s not the funny part

recently (and I say summer of 2015 recently) more telescopes have been in the works to expand VEHGR research, and more specifically CTA (The Cherenkov Telescope Array) is working towards making telescope arrays all around the globe so that we may see the entirety of the gamma ray sky. It’s all very exciting, and loads of us were pooled together to solder parts for the Schwarzschild-Couder telescope

the hilarious part

was coming up with names for all this

I kid you not. Imagine if you will several older professors who are Very Important and take Business Skype Meetings and you can never see them because they are Always Busy. now imagine if you will those same professors coming up to a bunch of college kids and asking us to name their groups, while keeping a few specific words in that acronym/initialism/etc.

Yes. I’m not even joking. Half of these names are made up by overly-caffeinated 4am college kids sitting around a table saying random names and eventually those names become the actual acronym for a Very Important Scientific Group. 

Now I had the pleasure (and several others of us) of being approached to create a name for a new group of people that would be in charge of debugging these new telescope systems. Yes, that’s right. An international scientist group, that will be responsible for code maintenance and technical support for telescopes with NASA and around the world was asking college kids for Names.

Our list was simple, and we had to include some of these words: debugging, quality, data, team, squad, control, effective(ness), assessing, etc

What did we come up with? several Suitably Scientific Names, like VENUS. VENAE, VIRGA, VITAL, VIVAS, VERITE

but then, there was The One

VADER, or Veritas Advanced Debugging & Examination for Resolutions

the group of five of us were crying. we had been on coding benders the entire week trying to make the deadlines for our research papers. some of us had crashed the servers while trying to do 47 runs (I had been pushing 25 on another, and had finished up what would have been over a week and a half of running time in less than 6 hours bc of using batch condor, but this other unlucky soul had gotten the yelling of a lifetime). and some of us had to resolder the over 700 parts that we had been putting together because the lasers weren’t being detected on the attached webcams. it was chaos, and from that desperation there was… this was perfection. 

and you know what? the got damed nerds that those scientists are, they’re going to call themselves VADER