The Pony Club: Synchrotron photos

Outside SER-CAT - the attractive walkway lighting.

another view of the outside of SER-CAT.

In the hutch on the BM station. The monitor in the background (it says "top camera" below the monitor) shows a zoom in on a crystal, which is held in a loop with a droplet of cryo-protectant. The big metal cylinder at the bottom of the picture is the liquid nitrogen reservoir for the robotics set-up. We haven't used it yet but it should really speed things up when it's up and runnning.

The goniometer (blocky thing on the right that says "270") is where we mount our crystals. At the end (on the left) of it you can see a thin copper pin and at the end of that very thin hair-like thing. that's the loop where the crystal is held (which you can't see because it's microscopic). The cold head (the thing pointing diagonally down from the top left towards the pin and loop) bathes the crystal in a stream of dry nitrogen cooled to 100K (around -180C). The x-ray collumator (or source) is obscured form view by the cold head, but it would be shooting just to the right of you if you were standing where the picture is taken from. The thin metal thing that comes from the bottom left and ends in front of the loop and pin is the direct beam stop and it is lined up with the crystal and the x-ray collimator.

Wires. They look important don't they - buggered if I know what they do.

The work station. Three monitors of non-stop gek action. On the left is the latest diffraction image collected (smeary blck ring-like thing - you can see the white shadow of the beam stop on the image) in the middle is the control panel where we enter our data collection parameters and the right is the archiving window. You can also see our lab book, where we write down everything we do, becuase even - sorry especially - in this computer age, nothing beats a good old-fashioned pen and paper for keeping records. That red cylinder is a water cup.

The view down the corridor that goes all the way around the accelerator ring at the back of the experiment hall. Those are the tricycles that provide endless fun at 3 in the morning and you can just about see the curve of the corridor. It takes about 10 minutes to go all the way around the ring at a leisurely cycling pace.

Cryst-to-the izzle oh-graphizzle! Too much coffee and the discovery of fingerless gloves led to this nonsense in the ID station hutch. The gloves (actually cotton gloveliners) are very useful for keeping our fingers warm when we dip them in liquid nitrogen to manipulate our crystals, so why some genius thought they'd order fingerless gloves is beyond me. When we turned up though there was a bag of 200 of the fingerless ones and only four very nasty used pairs with fingers. We'd left our own at home, naturally. I probably have some finger-related disease as a result.