Our department has been very busy between Astro Events, conferences, and construction at VVO — here are some updates.

Commencement

We celebrated the Class of 2024: some went off to grad school, some stayed here for their BA/MA, and some went on to other adventures. Here are some of our favorite photos of the day, we are so proud of these students!

Research in Science Symposium / Summer Construction

Over the summer months, our students worked with faculty mentors on research which culminated with a Symposium hosted in Exley. We had ongoing construction over the summer, which had everyone working together in the library and/or the upstairs classroom. It was not our typical summer, but it seemed to work and grew closer, literally, as a department. The upside is that Van Vleck Observatory now has functional AC for the summer and no more of the ancient steam radiators for heating in the winter.

StarGAYzing

In October we held our second annual StarGAYzing Event in partnership with Middletown Pride. It was a great event with lots of science and inclusion. Our students gave talks, did demonstrations, and ran the telescopes for the evening. We could not have asked for a better night.

Other Astro News

We had a busy Fall Semester with a group of students and faculty going to Colgate for the KNAC Fall Symposium. Space Nights, Kids’ Nights, Colloquiums, and other events have kept us busy. Over Spring Break, Prof. Meredith Hughes took a group of students to Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. We working to navigate the changes that have been arising with grants and funding just as many other institutions and departments are during this time. We are gearing up for the Sturm Memorial Lecture this month and Commencement next month. We will sneak in whatever events we can from now until May and then will welcome our summer research students on June 2nd. Soon (or possibly when you’re reading this) the new website will be launching and we can’t wait to see the end results.

Senior Thesis Champagne Pop

4 p.m. on April 17th marked the senior thesis deadline signaling the tradition of seniors popping champagne bottles on the steps of Olin Library. Here are some of our 2024 Seniors.

The Sturm Lecture

From Monday, April 22nd through Wednesday, April 24th we were honored to have Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer join us on campus as the speaker for the 2024 Sturm Memorial Lecture. During her visit, Dr. Oppenheimer graciously gave two lectures and met with various members of our department and the Wesleyan Campus. We held a reception after her first lecture which was open to the public for observing.

Elias Mansell BA’24/MA’25 wrote an article for the Wesleyan Argus linked here about this event.

Night Sky Celebration Don’t Let the Milky Way Go Extinct!

This event was the culmination of the Dark Skies Advocacy Group’s student forum. The event took place on Friday, April 19th at Van Vleck Observatory from 7-10pm.

Guests were invited to soak in the splendor of a dark night sky and learn about urgent threats to the space environment. Activities for all ages included a guided moonlit walk, stargazing through modern and historic telescopes, student talks, science demonstrations, and a planetarium star show. Snacks were provided and the event was well attended.

On Monday, April 8, 2024 Middletown, CT experienced a partial solar eclipse and a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of North America, Mexico, and Canada. With such an amazing event happening locally, our students and one of our postdocs jumped to action to host an on-campus event open to the Wesleyan Community and the public, here are some photos.

A special thank you to our friends at Russell Library in Middletown or co-hosting this event with us and providing additional eclipse glasses to distribute to attendees.

Where in the World were other Wes Astro Department Members?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.