Six of us made the trek to Apache Point Observatory (APO) in New Mexico from Haverford to spend most of our Spring Break observing on the 3.5m telescope here:
Haverford is part of the Northeast Participation Group, a consortium of a handful of small schools leasing time on the APO 3.5m from the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC). This is our very first use of our newly leased time. We are using the SPICam imager and DIS spectrograph to do a range of Galactic science. This is what DIS looks like:
We made our way via El Paso, and then via Alamagordo where we had lunch at the Hi D Ho Drive In where our pic made their Facebook page in fewer than 5 hours:
Of course we took some obligatory pics near the H-alpha highway sign:
Before settling in for a night of hard work observing dwarf galaxies with SPICam. Tianyi Yang, Eric Smith, Chris Nagele, Kai Faris, and Andrea Gaughan:
NSF AST-1151462, the KINSC, and the Green Fund provide support for our student trips to observatories.