Astronomy Department mourns the loss of two friends

A note from Professor Emeritus Bill Herbst:

We are sorry to report the passing of two long-time friends and supporters of the Astronomy Department, Stewart Novick, a Wesleyan Professor of Chemistry, and Robert Furber, a physics/astronomy major from the class of 1958.

Stew was like a member of the department, helping us out with countless tasks that required more senior faculty than we could muster ourselves, such as reviews, promotions and hires. He combined a broad interest and knowledge of astronomy with a kind willingness to serve on committees — we miss him. As an avid amateur astronomer he had acquired some nice equipment for viewing the skies, which he kindly donated to the department so that it can serve the next generation of students. The Chemistry Department shared this memoriam in October.

Bob was a a Physics/Astronomy double major who went on to a distinguished career in the aerospace industry. He maintained close associations with Wesleyan through class reunions, etc. After his retirement, he reached out to the Astronomy Department and became a close friend and donor. His generosity helped to support our research and public outreach activities. Bob joined us for VVO’s Centennial Celebration in 2016 and my retirement event in 2023. An obituary for Bob is available here.

243rd Meeting of The American Astronomical Society

Wes Astro at AAS 243 in NOLA : January 7-11, 2024

There was an amazing turnout of Wesleyan folks, past and present, at the 243rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. Here is just a partial list of contributors and attendees that were present. Apologies to those I missed! Please add additional names and pics below.

Current Staff and Students: Roy Kilgard, Seth Redfield, Sarah Wellons, Azmain Nisak, Rewa Bush, Kyle McGregor, Qiushi (Chris) Tian, Owen Gonzales, Jamar Kittling, Josh Grajales, and Uday Narayanan.

Alumni: Alaina Einsig, Katie Bennett, Molly Watstein, Ismael Mirales, Katharine Hesse, Amy Steele, Mark Popinchalk, Phil Choi, Girish Duwuri, Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, Samuel Factor, Janice Lee, and Cassie Fallscheer.

Kids’ Nights at Van Vleck Observatory

This fall semester we welcomed back Kids’ Nights at Van Vleck Observatory for elementary aged children and their adults. Our students crafted science talks and activities for our visitors and answered questions about space, telescopes, and anything else.

We will be hosting Kids’ Nights during the Spring 2024 semester on the following dates: Friday, February 2nd; Friday, March 1st; Friday, April 5th; and Friday, May 3rd. All of our Kids’ Nights events begin at 7:00PM and require pre-registration though Middletown Parks & Recreation. Spaces are limited so we suggest registering soon if you’re interested, if you register and are unable to attend, please let Middletown Parks & Recreation know so they can move someone off the waitlist.

Please visit our department website for a full schedule of public events and more news from the Wesleyan Astronomy Department!

1st Annual VVO Star GAYzing Event

How Star GAYzing Started

Over the summer, Rewa Bush who is a second year graduate student along with senior Victoria Dozer and MA graduate Alaina Einsig participated in an equity and ethics journal club, from that stemmed the idea of this event. They proposed Star GAYzing to our department and sprung into action recruiting other students, departments, and outside organizations to help.

The Astronomy Department partnered with Wesleyan’s Women In Science, The Resource Center, The Office of Equity & Inclusion, and The City of Middletown Pride Commission to bring this amazing event to life. Through their generous funding we were able to source refreshments from a local queer-owned business (Tony’s Flour Shop), and purchase supplies and decorations that turned the observatory into a celebratory and welcoming space.

When addressing the students who were helping to pull this event together, Rewa noted “I’m thrilled that we’re intentionally creating space for queer folks to enjoy the night sky together and feel ownership and belonging in science.” This struck me. Our department hosts many events, both public and private, but this is the first event aimed toward our queer community. We will now be making this event an annual event during Wesleyan’s Pride Month in October.

What did we have?

In addition to the beautiful and delicious cookies from Tony’s Flour Shop, we had popcorn, space themed candy, ice cream, and cupcakes for snacks. We also had buttons courtesy of The Resource Center and stickers. Oh, did you mean science stuff? Our students planned and presented mini lectures and a portable planetarium show. Additionally, we had three telescopes for viewing the night sky and activities for kids and adults to show their creative side. Most importantly, we had an observatory full of queer people and allies. It was a beautiful night outside so we could spill out onto Foss Hill when it got too hot inside (next year we will have AC!).

Rainbows everywhere — including for our QR codes of resources — that will stay up in VVO for the rest of Wesleyan Pride Month.

On a personal note…

Over here on top of Foss Hill we are a bit separated from the rest of Wes, but that makes us a very close department. We support one another in a way that is very special and I personally want to thank every person who took part in this event and supported our vision. We have a truly welcoming and inclusive community here and I am grateful to work in this department.

Thank you Francesca (2027), Max (2025), Jamar (2024), George (2026), Sofia (2025), and Angelina (2025).

Thank you Kyle (2024), Chris (2024), Cat (MA 2025), Fi (RJ Julia), MaryClare (MA), Jeremy (2026), Brianna (postdoc), Victoria (2024), Rewa (MA 2024), Katie (MA 2025), Lisseth (MA 2024), Alaina (MA 2023), and Venus (2026) who is not pictured.

Thank you Junu (2025).

Thank you Christopher Forte and Middletown Pride, it was a pleasure working with you to co-sponsor this event. We can’t wait for next year!

Resources

Celebrating Bill Herbst’s Wesleyan Career

On Friday, May 26th, after 43 years at Wesleyan, and a two year delay due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, we were finally able to celebrate Bill Herbst’s retirement from Wesleyan! Thank you to all the friends, family, faculty, colleagues, current, and past students who were able to attend this special event.

About Prof. Bill Herbst

Bill grew up in southern New Jersey and was an undergraduate at Princeton University, where he majored in Astrophysics and graduated with High Honors. He received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Toronto. He taught for two years at York University in Toronto and then accepted a position in Washington, D. C., as a Carnegie Fellow at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), a branch of the Carnegie Institution. In 1978, he joined the faculty at Wesleyan University where he rose to the rank of Professor and was the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy from 1991 until his retirement in 2021. His current title is John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus.

He is an astronomer interested in star formation, planet formation, meteorites, chondrules, T Tauri stars and the formation of the Earth. He observes and interprets the light variations of T Tauri stars, objects that are similar in mass to the Sun but at an age (< 10 Myr) when their planetary systems were still forming. This research makes use of telescopes at Van Vleck Observatory (VVO) on the Wesleyan campus, other facilities around the world, and space telescopes. An object of particular interest whose unique behavior was discovered at VVO is known as KH 15D, and has been shown to be a “proto-Tatooine” object — that is, a binary star system orbited by a ring of material that may one day consolidate to form planets orbiting a double star like the fictional home world of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. More recently, has become interested in chondrules and chondritic meteorites, which are the most primitive samples of the solar nebula that reach the Earth’s surface on their own. In collaboration with James P. Greenwood of Wesleyan’s E&ES department, he has developed a theory of chondritic meteorite formation that addresses a long-standing problem in cosmochemisty, the origin of the chondrules. Their theory correctly predicted the density of the rocks on Ryugu, the first asteroid from which a substantial sample of rocks was returned, and also correctly predicted that these rocks would contain few, if any, chondrules.

Speakers

We welcomed to campus Catrina Hamilton-Drager, Joshua Winn, and Nicole Arulanantham to give seminars with Wesleyan’s Jim Greenwood. These speakers highlighted various topics that Bill had worked on during his time at Wesleyan. Bill ended the seminar series with remarks about his time at Wesleyan and his research during his time here and beyond.

It’s Not Goodbye…

Although Bill has officially retired from Wesleyan, he is still active in our department and we are happy he kept an office in VVO. He comes in from time to time to fill us in on his travels and what he is working on now.

Wes Astronomers at Green Bank!

This fall as part of the Radio Astronomy class, our majors and MA students had the opportunity to travel to Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.  After enduring the 9-hour drive each way, we were let loose on the 40-ft telescope and were also allocated a big chunk of time on the 20-meter telescope.  We toured the receiver lab and the operating room for the Green Bank Telescope, and saw some of the new/experimental facilities like the CHIME outrigger.  The students even managed to survive ~36 hours in the National Radio Quiet Zone without their devices and connection to the outside world!  The Green Bank site was peaceful, beautiful, and awe-inspiring, and several of the students saw the Milky Way for the first time.

Return of the Inflatable Planetarium!

Wesleyan’s astronomy department has had a pair of old Starlab inflatable planetariums for many years, but in 2019 we added a new digital planetarium to our arsenal… which we used for only one semester before the pandemic hit and packing dozens of children into close proximity in a little bubble of air started to seem like not such a great idea for a while.  This year, thanks to data on air exchange rates in inflatable planetariums from colleagues in the UK, along with an awesome level of cooperation from our community on wearing masks in the planetarium environment, we were finally able to bring back planetarium presentations for our Middletown community!

This semester we opened the planetarium for several events: a Scout group visit to the observatory, two days’ worth of expeditions to Macdonough School, a planetarium night at the local public library, and one more school visit.  Students in our Astronomical Pedagogy seminar worked all semester to learn how to use the planetarium equipment, to understand developmental expectations and educational standards for children of different ages, to think about the role of storytelling in science communication, and to practice and give each other feedback on their presentations.  The results were awesome!  Kids in grades K-5 learned about gravity, seasons, the day/night cycle, Morse code, and so much more — our students were pros at getting the kids excited to learn more about space.

Sidewalk Science

This semester our Astronomical Pedagogy seminar is doing “Sidewalk Science” in collaboration with Middletown’s Russell Library during the month of October.  We’ve been collecting questions about space from library patrons and Middletown residents, and each week a team of students chalks responses on the sidewalk in front of the library.

Check out our first round of chalkings, and if you’re in the Middletown area, please visit the web form and submit your questions about space!  Photos of the chalkings will be posted on the library’s and observatory’s social media.

Got space questions?
Got space questions?

Alaina doing the first chalking
Alaina doing the first chalking

Why are moon craters round?
Why are moon craters round?

Does it rain diamonds on Neptune?
Does it rain diamonds on Neptune?

Why aren't people in space?
Why aren’t people in space?

Is Pluto a planet?
Is Pluto a planet?

Pluto is a dwarf planet
Pluto is a dwarf planet!

Astronomy Department Statement on George Floyd, Racism, and Police Brutality

We are living through a tumultuous moment in our nation’s history: one that has both caused and brought to light a great deal of pain, anguish, and suffering, especially for people of color in the United States.  This moment presents an opportunity to take a stand and renew our commitment to actively work against the racism and violence against people of color that permeates the fabric of our society as well as our scientific community.  We stand in solidarity with the protestors insisting on an end to violence against individuals and communities of color, a dismantling of systemic institutional racism, and reform of police. We unequivocally affirm that black lives matter.  We acknowledge that the impact of recent events, particularly the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, is disproportionately heavy for people of color in our community, and affirm our support and care for those most directly affected by racism and the efforts to combat it.

We acknowledge that, together with all segments of our society, science has contributed and continues to contribute to the history of violence and oppression of Black and Brown Americans.  We acknowledge that systematic barriers to the full participation of scientists of color exist today, woven into the fabric of the field of astronomy, and that we must actively work to dismantle them and create opportunities for scientists of color.  Our community of learning and discovery requires us to actively work to build an anti-racist organization and support our community members that bear the additional burden of inequity in our society.  Here are a few ways that our department pledges to do some of that work in the coming months and years:

– While the physics GRE has always been optional for applicants to our MA program in astronomy, this year for the first time we will not accept scores at all.

– The astronomy faculty are building and expanding upon modules that explicitly weave STEM equity and inclusion and scientific ethics into the astronomy curriculum.  Two examples include the ethics component of Astronomical Pedagogy seminar, which will be expanded this fall, and the CIS321 seminar on STEM equity and inclusion, which will be taught for the third time this fall.  The latter course explicitly encourages students to design evidence-based initiatives to increase STEM equity and inclusion at Wesleyan, in collaboration with existing groups and structures, and includes both logistical faculty support and funding for those efforts.  We welcome and encourage all members of the Wesleyan astronomy community to join us in these endeavors.

– We will reignite the conversations that have taken place in our department as part of our Diversity Journal Club series, which has lapsed for the past two years, to provide a regular departmental forum to discuss issues related to STEM equity and inclusion, particularly anti-racist efforts, and to plan future action we can take as a department.

– We have benefited from discussions in the department of underrepresentation in astronomy which were driven by visiting researchers who spoke to these issues. This academic year, we will seek to bring in a speaker to give a department-wide seminar on anti-racism in astronomy, with appropriate recognition and compensation for their time and expertise.

– We are committed to a sustained community presence, particularly in K-12 schools that serve demographics underrepresented in astronomy, as part of our public outreach in astronomy.  We will also redouble our efforts to invite children and parents of color into our observatory.

– As individuals, we reaffirm our commitment to dismantling racist structures in our broader Wesleyan campus, our home communities, and our families.

We acknowledge that these actions are a small part in an ongoing and evolving effort. Above all, we pledge to educate ourselves, to do the work of becoming a better and more equitable department, and to support and care for the safety and well being of all of our students and colleagues, but especially those most vulnerable to the systematic oppression embedded within science and our broader human society that we have been reminded of so vividly in recent weeks.

Bill Herbst
Meredith Hughes
Roy Kilgard
Ed Moran
Seth Redfield

Department Holiday Party 2019

As usual, our holiday party was a festive event, thanks to the incredible hard work of Linda Shettleworth and the good spirits of students, faculty and families. The food was great, the company was fabulous and a good time was had by all. It is so much fun for the elders to watch the next generation coming along. The pictures say it all!