Many of my colleagues in the EBEX experiment have just lit out for the west. Specifically, the team is heading off to Palestine (pronounced “Palesteen“), Texas, to get the telescope and instrument ready for its big Antarctic long-duration balloon flight at the end of the year, when we hope to gather our first real scientific data and observe the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Unlike the Planck Satellite, which has a few dozen detectors changed little from those that flew on MAXIMA and BOOMEReNG in the 1990s, EBEX can use more modern technology, and will fly with thousands of detectors, allowing us to achieve far greater sensitivity to the smallest variations in the CMB.

Asad, one of the EBEX postdocs, involved in the experiment for several years, will be writing on the EBEX in Flight blog about the experiences down in Texas and, we hope, the future path of the team and telescope down to Antarctica. Follow along as the team drives across the country (at least twice), assembles and tests the instrument, breaks and fixes things, sleeps too little, works too hard, and, we hope, builds the most sensitive CMB experiment yet deployed. (And of course, eats cheeseburgers.)

And if you want a change from cosmology, you can instead follow along with another friend, Marc, who is trying to see if he can come to grips with writing on an iPad in the supposedly post-PC world, over at typelesswriter.