So the first EHT run last night has gone really well, though of course there were a few technical issues. I really enjoyed being on the Slack channel and following the communications in realtime from all the stations across the globe. Not to mention the snarky comments (people competing between SPT and LMT for being a “big ungainly sail” when it comes to wind disrupting pointing accuracy…who knew??). But if that weren’t enough, the black hole X-ray binary Cyg X-3 decided to have a massive flare!! So at the 11th hour, with the folk having been up all night, there was a flash decision to point 3 telescopes (JCMT-SMA-SMT) of the full configuration at the source. So much great science, so little time!! Unfortunately the process of correlating the data and getting results is going to be very involved, so we won’t know what we saw for several months after the runs. Talk about delayed gratification.
