Away on an experiment

So I've been away from home for the last six weeks doing an experiment (with a week in Germany for a conference, see earlier post). The experiment was done in a room the size of a sports hall and we were sat in a little shed on stilts. Outside the shed was a big ion source that makes a noise like a jumbo jet taking off. The job of the ion source was to make a beam of hydrogen atoms. As these entered the shed we directed them onto a crystal we had made and from the way the ions bounced off the crystal we could work out the crystal structure. All very good in principle but in practice there is a lot of waiting around. A piece of kit so big is ripe for problems. If it wasn't the beam going down it was the detectors not working right (counting atoms that weren't there) and if these two both worked then our crystal preparation recipe hadn't worked. Out of the five weeks in the lab we got about a week and a half where things were good and we worked all day to get as much data as possible. Now I have to analyse the data and see if we got anything good and try and work out if we managed to make anything new and interesting.