I considered ‘live-blogging’ from the Swiss Light Source synchrotron for about a femtosecond until I remembered that 99% of ‘beamtime’ is boring and uneventful. That is, assuming everything goes well. For now, it’s boring—which is good. Need evidence? Here’s our standard operating procedure:

1) Secure hutch and open shutter to beam.
2) Does setting X look reasonable? If no, proceed to step 3. If yes, skip to step 4.
3) Click mouse button once and check again. Repeat until setting X reaches desirable value.
4) Begin data collection.
5) Wait eight hours
6) Change sample
7) Repeat steps 1-6 for several days (or until you can’t take it anymore and run out of the building screaming your head off).

Actually, I kind of like it. It feels like a privilege to be around such amazing engineering accomplishment. After all, there are only a few in the world. Note: I looked online for the actual number but it seems to be up to some debate. All in all there are about 70 so don’t rely on this list from wikipedia.