Painting the JCMT

While at home these past few months, I've been a bit constrained in my painting by a lack of painting materials (namely, I don't have a very wide array of colors with me—most of my paint is still at my desk in Swinburne, and will be there for at least the next month-and-a-half—and I also didn't have much canvas with me when the first lockdown started). However, I did have a canvas in progress which I started near the end of last year, of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope where I used to work from 2013–2016. Thankfully, it didn't require a wide variety of colors, and I'd already blocked in about half of it back in November (based on the only in-progress picture of it I could find), though I took a few months' break from it after that. I've been working on it slowly off and on over the course of the lockdown(s), and I finally finished it last week.

“James Clerk Maxwell Telescope,” acrylic on canvas, 14×18”.

I based this off a photo taken by a college friend of mine who was a telescope operator at the JCMT for a few years, contemporaneously with me. If you're not familiar with the JCMT, it's a telescope which detects light in the sub-millimeter wavelength range, between infrared and radio waves. The dish itself sits behind the large Gore-Tex membrane in the world, which is the area in the middle of the painting with the contour lines. (The Gore-Tex is essentially invisible at sub-millimeter wavelengths, so it doesn't block the observations.)

(Incidentally, getting the contour lines to look not-wrong may have been the hardest part of the painting, as I painted them on only to realize they looked wrong at least twice. The membrane has a somewhat complicated shape, so I ended up drawing them on with pencil so I could more easily change them, and after several weeks of adjusting them they're at least approximately correct.)

Another neat fact about the JCMT is that the SCUBA-2 sub-millmeter camera (which I worked with primarily, though on the quality assurance side) is the coldest place in the known universe: the detector is kept at a working temperature of just 70 millikelvins above absolute zero. This is because the detector has to be colder than what it's observing to prevent swamping the observation with thermal noise, and sub-millimeter light comes from extremely cold gas and dust, on the order of a few to tens of kelvins.

Anyway, that's one of the things I've been working on lately. I'd like to do another painting of the other telescope I've worked at (the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array) on the last canvas I have with me, but as I only just started that this week it probably won't be done anytime soon (though it's also a much smaller canvas, so we'll see). Maybe I can start a series of “Observatories I Have Worked At.” And maybe in the future, it'll contain more than two paintings! Who knows? A hui hou!

The Lockdown Life

This past Wednesday, Melbourne (and one shire to the north) went back into Stage 3 lockdown for six weeks due to rising case number of COVID-19. This is after we'd gotten all the way down a few days in early June with zero new reported cases, then a few weeks of just single-digit new cases. Then, near the end of June, we started getting double-digit numbers, which stretched into two weeks, then eventually breached triple digits just within the last week or so. In contrast, most of the rest of Australia has been completely or almost completely free of reported new cases, other than New South Wales which is still getting a low number irregularly. Practically overnight Victoria has became a pariah state, with all the other states and territories closing their borders and politely but firmly making it known that Victorians aren't welcome 'round these parts, y’hear?

It's a bit of a disappointment, considering we seemed to have beaten the virus more-or-less and were starting to open back up again. Out of an abundance of caution I didn't go anywhere since the lockdown started to lift in late May except for a single visit to friends, but as June progressed I was starting to think about heading into my desk at Swinburne to pick some things up (especially some more paint and something to paint on, as I have a very limited selection of the former and have nearly run out of the latter).

It's odd that this second lockdown hit me harder than the first one, considering I hadn't even really come out of the first one to begin with; I know friends who were starting to get out and about in the interim where it seemed like we were on top of things. It just feels more unjust somehow—those of us who've been being good for months now are forced back into lockdown through no fault of our own due to the actions of a relatively tiny amount of people who took "lockdown being lifted" for "business as usual" and ignored social distancing guidelines put in place to prevent exactly this happening. Before the lockdown, someone could be excused for not knowing what was happening amidst the confusion and unwittingly spreading the virus before becoming symptomatic; it's a lot harder to justify such behavior afterwards when they should know better.

Then as I was preparing to lead our small group Bible study Thursday night, a verse in 1 Peter I'd been looking at all week jumped out at me:

For is it better, if the will of God, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.
   —1 Peter 3:17

While it's still pretty annoying to have to forego any hope of taking a trip anywhere further than walking distance for another month and a half, I can at least agree with this in principle: I'm glad the lockdown isn't of my doing, and I don't have any lives on my conscience from spreading the virus to potential victims. It's just frustrating when the reward for doing good is the absence of a negative rather than a more tangible positive, but I suppose that's just the world we live in. And that I'd probably feel rather differently if I were in the other position.

In the meantime, it's not like I'm ever going to run out of things to do from my home: I've still got a Ph.D. to finish, papers and a thesis to write, plenty of games that won't play themselves, some art projects I should really get around to finishing and sharing, and I've started copying Brahm's absolutely fantastic “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,” which is of pleasantly maddening complexity. (I find myself needing to dive into the LilyPond documentation quite frequently to figure out how to represent the various intricacies and special cases of music notation that pop up.) And hey, at least it beats being in the hospital! A hui hou!