Hey everyone! As you may have heard, the SETI @ Berkeley search of the Kepler field is happening -- right now!

Our Kepler SETI observations at Green Bank are going swimmingly. Here's a
short status dispatch from Andrew:

We have observed 8.75 of 24 hours and we've gotten through 70 of our 86
candidates. We encountered a couple of hiccups in our first few hours
which resulted in a bit of data loss. The first problem was a subtle bug
in the real-time quantization routine that converts GUPPI 8 bit data to 2
bits for writing data to disk. Paul's sleuthing uncovered that a memory
address index was typed incorrectly and the address computation
overflowed, causing a segmentation violation. The net result was that we
lost about 10% of our data on the first 60 targets, but the loss was
confined to individual 100 MHz bands in individual observations. The
second issue was a degraded RAID array on one of eight compute nodes that
prevented writing to disk at the requisite rate. This resulted in a small
amount of packet loss for the 1500-1600 MHz band in about half our
observations. We're still assessing the full impact of this, but I
believe it will be minimal.

We had originally planned on splitting our time between targeted
observations of the 86 candidates and a raster scan of the entire field.
On the targeted side, this allowed for 450s/target + overhead. We ended
up needing a bit more overhead time than we had planned (1 hour test time,
longer accel/deaccel of the telescope than I expected, some diagnostic
observations of pulsars), but we re-worked the on-off cadence to use other
Kepler stars as off-source observations, saving us 150s per target for the
same on-source integration time. As it stands, we're a little bit ahead
of schedule. After finishing up our candidate list, I propose
re-observing a few of the candidates with the largest amount of data loss
and then moving into raster scan observations with 12.5 hours available.

Our next 5 hour block is scheduled for this evening, beginning at 8pm PT.