Wesleyan astronomy students and faculty traveled to Vassar College for the 24th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium of the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium (KNAC), held on October 25 and 26, 2013. About 85 astronomy faculty and students attended the one-day symposium, listening to talks by students at our institutions who did summer research projects in astronomy. KNAC is currently supported by an NSF grant to Wesleyan University. Member colleges are: Colgate, Haverford, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams.

In addition to the talks, we enjoyed a dinner and evening star party hosted at the Vassar College Observatory. Student speakers from Wesleyan were Junior Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein and Sophomore Jesse Tarnas. Also attending from Wesleyan were: Suwun Suwunnarat, Avram Stein, Girish Duvvurl, Maia Neiles-Sager, Julian Dann and Simon Wright, as well as Professors William Herbst, Meredith Hughes, Roy Kilgard and Seth Redfield.

The student speakers at the KNAC conference at Vassar.

Also presenting at the conference were KNAC students who worked at Wesleyan last summer, doing research under the direction of Wesleyan faculty. Four students from last summer gave talks. They were: Frankie Encalada from Broward College, who worked with Professor Meredith Hughes, Rachel Pedersen from Bates College who worked with Professor Bill Herbst, Alyssa Sokol from Colgate University who worked with Post-doc Adam Jensen and Estella de Souza from Bryn Mawr College who worked with Professor Seth Redfield. Will Harney of Union College presented a poster paper based on his summer research with Professor Meredith Hughes.

 

 

Last night the Introductory Astronomy (ASTR155) class took over the CCD imager on the 24″ telescope.  We checked out a colorful binary star system, Albireo, through different filters and saw the stars change their relative brightnesses as we switched from blue light to red light (one star is redder and the other is bluer, because they are different temperatures).  We also tried some 3-color observing with famous Messier objects, and were able to reconstruct a full-color image of the Ring Nebula.  Here are two pictures from last night’s observing session: the first uses B, V, and R filters to approximate a true-color RGB image of the nebula, and the second uses a narrow-band Halpha filter to bring out the red color and structure of Hydrogen in the outer layers of the nebula (which works great, but with the unfortunate side effect that the background stars look blue!)

We’ll post more pictures of the reinstallation process soon, but for now, here’s a quick comparison of the mirror before re-aluminization and after.

Before:

After:

Periodically, telescopes need to have their mirrors cleaned and coated with a new layer of shiny aluminum. Here are some photos of the removal of the 24″ mirror and preparation to ship it off for re-aluminizing on May 9th, 2013.

 The telescope backplane with all instruments removed.

 Astronomy professor Seth Redfield and Bruce Strickland from the Wes science machine shop move the lift into place for lowering the mirror cell.

 Dave Strickland from the science machine shop aligns the lift. The mirror cell rests on metal cylinders as it is lowered from the telescope.

 Dave Strickland removes the central tube from the 24″ mirror cell.

 The mirror cell rests on blocks as we prepare to remove the mirror itself.

 The 24″ mirror. As you can see, the surface looks a bit dirty.

 One last look at the mirror before we seal it in its box.

The students in Wesleyan’s upper-level Radio Astronomy course have spent the semester assembling a Small Radio Telescope (SRT), designed by Alan Rogers at Haystack Observatory. Today the newest member of Wes’s telescopic arsenal saw first light! We employed the total power capability to detect the Sun and used it to map out the telescope beam (spectroscopy is still in the works). Students in Wesleyan astronomy classes can use this telescope to study bright radio sources like the Sun, Cyg-X, and Cas A; map galactic rotation (detect your own dark matter!); and practice principles of radio astronomy.

Many, many thanks are due to the experts who advised the students on assembling the different system components, and worked on some of the hairier machining and electronics: Jon Wallace (Wes alumnus, SARA member, and radio telescope builder extraordinaire), Dave and Bruce Strickland (of the Wesleyan machine shop), and Mike Koziol (our electronics wizard). Wesleyan is the first university to assemble the upgraded SRT system based on the parts list and plans published by Haystack, rather than buying the system as a kit as other universities were able to do in the past, so we needed all the help we could get.  Sophomore Laiya Ackman also volunteered her free time to help assemble the dish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see photos from the official Wesleyan photo blog here.  And here are a few pictures from various stages of the construction process:

 

Central Connecticut is right on the edge of accuweather’s predicted optimal viewing zone for an auroral display on earth tonight. The remains of a solar storm will be sweeping by, hopefully right around sunset on the east coast. Keep an eye on the sky tonight!

Read more here!

Where engineers build their telescopes, astronomers will inevitably come. One of the great perks of having a career path associated with the night sky is the opportunity to visit places where the stars I study shine the brightest. Thanks to Wesleyan University’s newest Assistant Professor of Astronomy, Meredith Hughes, I (Eric Edelman ’13) was able to assist as a student observer at the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on the big island of Hawaii for spring break. Mahalo, Meredith!

The SMA is a telescope array composed of eight individual antennas that specializes in submillimeter, or radio, wavelengths. It is situated near 13,000 feet above sea level, close to the summit of Mauna Kea, one of Hawaii’s inactive volcanoes. This daunting altitude helps the SMA to avoid many atmospheric issues that particularly stymie ground based submillimeter observations. Fortunately, the observing station has an oxygenated control room, so I was able to remain coherent enough during my stay to absorb and document my nights as half guest observer and half gawking, consistently over-impressed tourist.

My five days on the summit gave me a quick glimpse into the many and varied challenges face by ground-based observers. In particular, the weather during my trip was extremely changeable. On my first night at that dark, isolated summit, the starry night sky was clear and vivid enough to drown in. That night, the SMA engineers worked on installing new hardware and the observers set the antennas’ sights on an AGN (active galactic nucleus), which is an extremely luminous galactic nucleus, thought to be caused by large-scale, energetic accretion of matter into the galaxy’s supremely supermassive black hole. However, by my fifth and last observing night, wind and icy snow buffeted the summit, shaded by thick, unmoving clouds, and observing or testing anything was as far from possible as it ever could be. A big portion of an observer’s job is to keep one’s eyes trained on those weather sites in order to adapt accordingly to whatever challenges the fickle weather patterns end up throwing his or her way.

While the sudden snow storm was certainly exciting, I could not enjoy those nights quite as much as I could the clear ones, when actual observing occurred. On those nights, when everything was in working order, every so often I could not help but lean back in my chair in that chilly control room and try and digest the magnitude of this whole operation. Right in front of me, only about ten yards away, was an array of telescopes pointed at and collecting information on an object most likely millions of parsecs away from us. The scale and finesse of observational astronomy has never ceased to impress me, and seeing the SMA in action was a treat to be remembered.

For any readers local to the Wesleyan campus, keep in mind that public observing is held at the campus observatory on clear Wednesday nights from 8:00-9:00pm. We cannot promise you AGNs, but I would still highly recommend a trip to Van Vleck to see the stars if you can make it!

Amy Steele, a first year MA student viewed the solar eclipse of Nov. 13, 2012, from northern Australia and sent along the attached photo. She was part of a team hoping to make measurements during totality but it looks like clouds got in the way. Nonetheless, they were able to see parts of the eclipse and she got a very nice image of a partial phase viewed through the clouds.