Author: bwillman

Today, our Astronomical Ideas class (taught by Desika Narayanan and I) had the luxury of meeting in Haverford’s Special Collections wing of the library. The precious nature of our holdings is only exceeded by the intellectual and personal generosity of the staff (namely Ann Upton and Sarah Horowitz, who we’ve worked with extensively) and by the philosophy of the department – These materials are meant to be interacted with.

Here, Sarah is explaining the motivation for the plates inserted into this first edition of Newton’s Principia:

Here is Enrico Fermi’s positive response to his invitation to visit Haverford College in the 1950’s, and an accompanying Haverford College newspaper article about the visit:

(As viewed over our 1st edition of Copernicus’s 1543 Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres) Students are enjoying the Principia and a 16th century book about sundials, that the library only recently received:

Edwin Schroedinger was a real card, as evidenced by this handwritten letter from him to Haverford’s president in the 1950’s. I’m not sure if he ever did accept Haverford’s invitation to visit:

Students gather around a first edition of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as well as letters from Fermi and Schroedinger to Haverford, and a letter from Maria Mitchell about a borrowed sextant:

“What is that?” “That is Isaac Newton’s signature on a bill!” as other students casually flip through our Copernicus and Newton books:

This week, we had two half nights to observe on the 3.5m ARC telescope at Apache Point Observatory. Last Spring, I took 5 students to APO to use this telescope on site. After going on that trip, we were officially checked out to use the telescope remotely from right here in Haverford.

On Sunday, Chris Nagele (’16) and I observed from my dining room. Conditions were tough – blowing snow on the mountain – so we only had a couple of hours on sky, and with poor image quality. Last night, we had clear and cold conditions and we able to observe for our entire 7 hour window. Despite some rookie mistakes made by me that lost us about 30 minutes of time, we accomplished our mission to observe some galaxy spectra with the DIS instrument.

Jonathan Hargis (postdoc), Alison Marqusee (’16) and Eric Smith (’15) assisted with the observations in my office, while Dave Sand and Paul Bennet (Texas Tech) Skype’ed in and assisted from Lubbock, Texas. We all ate too many snacks.

Here, I’m showing Alison and Eric a galaxy spectrum that Dave sent over after a quick analysis:

Now we’re smiling for Jonathan to show that we aren’t all business:

All six of us were working in Texas and Haverford on different computers on different tasks. Here, Jonathan is checking the spectroscopic data and Eric is filling in our observing log:

NSF AST-1151462, the Boughn-Gollub-Partridge Fund, the KINSC, and the Green Fund provide support for our student-faculty collaborative work on the ARC 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory.

On Monday, November 10, Maya Barlev stopped by Strawbridge Observatory. She talked about her Watson Fellowship experience, and her work in astronomy outreach and education since then. It was a treat to spend an hour with Maya and current Haverford students over tea and donuts. What a great visit!

(In photo – Top: Lee Rosenthal (’15), Chris Nagele (’16), Maya Barlev (’12), Eric Smith (’15); Bottom: Sarah Betti (’17), Rui Fang (’17), Arjun Khandelwal (’17)).

 

After observing for two nights, Haverford decided to explore more of New Mexico and ventured down to the White Sands National Monument for some fun in the sun.

While there, we played catch:

Went sand sledding:

And a few of us even explored the desert:

Spending the day at White Sands was a great way to spend our free day in New Mexico! A 10/10 experience. Would sled again.

Check out these videos of our sledding adventures:

ChrisAlmostSurfs

AndreaSledChamp

NSF AST-1151462, the KINSC, and the Green Fund provide support for our student trips to observatories.

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.

Over Spring Break in March, John Bochanski and I took 4 students to Tucson. Three current sophomores in my Intro to Astrophysics class (Dan DeLuzio, Lyn Oehrig, Tianyi Yang) and a senior astronomy major at Swarthmore, Jake Neely. As always, the Green Fund and Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center supported our trip.

We arrived on a Monday and, after a quick stop at In-and-Out burger, headed straight for the mirror lab at the University of Arizona. This amazing facility is where the largest mirrors for the largest telescopes in the world are made, including mirrors to go in the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Buddy Martin is a Haverford alum who is the polishing scientist and the Team Leader for the optics team at the lab. He very generously invited us for a special tour of the facility. John brought along his camera and got a couple of nice pics, including one of all of us posed near the LSST mirror.

The next morning, we headed up the mounting for our four night run on the WIYN 0.9m telescope. We were there to obtain time-series observations of a couple of Milky Way satellites, including Ursa Major II and Bootes III. This summer, students will use these data to search for RR Lyrae stars. We had a great time!

This pic shows Lyn and Dan working on making a pretty picture out of some fun observations. The students enjoyed making pics out of nebulae including the Crab and Ring nebulae:

Although we spent most of the time working hard, John found time to go outside and take an art shot (I’m having technical challenges uploading it for some reason) and also time to make us pose for a group pic.

[I wrote this posting in late 2012, but never got it posted on the Astronoblog. Here you go!]

Last semester, Haverford and its students got to experience the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and its discoveries through a special event and a related project engaged in by our Astronomical Ideas students.

Saving Hubble screening
At the end of October 2012, we had two distinguished visitors to campus to participate in a number of Hubble-related events with students, faculty and the public: David Gaynes (director of the documentary Saving Hubble) and Nitya Kallivayalil (astrophysicist, Yale University). The first event was a big dinner in the observatory, for our visitors, our students, faculty, and local amateur astronomers. The dinner was great fun. Unfortunately the skies were cloudy, so we couldn’t take full advantage of the expertise of our amateur astronomy friends. After dinner, about a hundred students, and members of the public gathered in Stokes Auditorium for a screening of Gaynes’s film Saving Hubble. Afterwards, we had a panel discussion were Gaynes and Kallivayalil talked about the film itself, as well as some of Hubble’s major discoveries:

The next day, Gaynes, Kallivayalil, John Bochanski (astronomy postdoc at Haverford) and I went to our Special Collections to view the 1543 first edition of Copernicus’s book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, Newton’s Principia as well as early editions of some of Einstein’s work. We were generously hosted by John Anderies (who you can see in the picture below) and Ann Upton, as always.

We enjoyed our trip to Special Collections so much, that we needed to hurry to reach the Visual Studies lunch, hosted by John Muse and Vicky Funari, in time. We had an enjoyable conversation about visualization in astronomy, and in particular related to the images produced by HST. The conversation sparked some ongoing exchanges between John Bochanski, Willie Williams and I about HST images as “fine art”. [This reminds me, that I should follow-up on this!]

Gaynes’ and Kallivayalil’s visit was capped off by visits to my back-to-back Astronomical Ideas classes, during which the students could ask them questions. The students were required to attend the screening the night before and hand in questions they had afterwards. To structure the class visit, Gaynes, Kallivayalil, and I curated a list of discussion questions from that set. The pic below makes the class visits look far less exciting than it actually was. I’m an astronomer, not a photographer.

These visits and associated events were supported by the Humanities Center, the KINSC, and the Provost’s office.

Inspired by HST’s discoveries and the visits of Gaynes and Kallivayalil, Astronomical Ideas students worked in teams to record podcasts about an object that HST has observed. They were great fun to listen to; this project has been one of the highlights of the last two iterations of Astronomical Ideas at Haverford.

This evening, we hosted a wildly successful and fun event in Strawbridge Observatory for families in our community. Thanks to Mariah Baker, the student who led the event, and a number of other student volunteers, we entertained 125+ guests in our small space. Mariah knocked it out of the park with her selection of fun science-based activities, her preparation and leadership, and the awesome signs she created. She deserves huge recognition for her accomplishment in pulling off this event. We didn’t know if we would have 10 guests or 80 and we had more. Hopefully, many future scientists had fun with the telescope and activities on offer.

I have just a handful of phone pix taken before the event was in full swing. We were happily very busy with our generous turnout!

Lee Rosenthal and Mariah Baker talked about cratering with two guests. Kids were given the opportunity to select their own meteor and experiment with how height of infall correlated with the crater morphology generated upon impact.

Robin Chernow and Lyn Oehrig got very messy with oobleck – a slimy mixture of cornstarch and water that has properties in common with the Earth’s mantle. You can see some of the collateral damage in this picture.

This is our first audience for our liquid nitrogren comet ice cream. We went through about 80 spoons for kid visitors alone. Peter Ferguson started out as one of the student leads on this demonstration. Lee Rosenthal was the student lead for this awesome demonstration for the rest of the night, once Peter left to manage the telescope. Special thanks to Chemistry professor, Alex Norquist, for hooking us up with the dewars and LN2 access.

The paper bag space helmet craft activity was also a big hit, with junior Sarah Sofia setting a very high bar with the space helmet she made to begin the night.

The unsung heros in the basement, Alex Dillaire and Eric Smith, led a moon phase demonstration. They capitalized on the stream of customers heading to the basement bathroom sink, messy with melted ice cream and oobleck.

Last but not least, Peter Ferguson did a hero’s job on our 16-inch telescope. He and I carefully considered whether to open the dome given the prior night’s snow (and consulted Steve Boughn). While the main floor of the observatory was overflowing with astronomy, Peter opened the telescope on his own and safely led dozens of families through observing Jupiter and some star clusters.

I cannot speak highly enough for the excellence demonstrated by all of these student volunteers tonight. I felt privileged to be working along side of them.

NSF AST-1151462 provides support for our public outreach program.

I just returned from Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) with five students. We left our colleagues Professor Steve Boughn and students Alex Dillaire and Estella de Souza behind to finish up the last two nights of our observing run on the 0.9m telescope. Erica Hopkins and Sarah Sofia have already talked a bit about our experience (that also included Mimi Fuchs, Peter Ferguson, and Mariah Baker). I had an amazing time, and the students were highly impressive in their dilligence in data acquisition, analysis, and troubleshooting. We were very busy both nights, whether obtaining time-series observations of a Milky Way globular cluster for science, observing beautiful nebulae and galaxies for fun, looking up at the sky trying to see M31 with our naked eyes, trying to figure out how to reset the emergency stop switch, filling the dewar, eating spicy hot Cheetos, or listening to music. One highlight for me was seeing both Venus and Jupiter bright in the sunrise sky at 6 am.

I could go on and on about our trip, but I really want to show a few pictures taken by Mariah Baker:

Hello! I’m back from a year of junior leave. The fact that the Astronoblog is currently on the front page of www.haverford.edu has motivated me to finally post a couple of things that I’ve wanted to share for awhile.

We caught five of our eight astronomy and astrophysics majors in one photograph on graduation day. In this pic (I believe taken by Erin Boettcher’s parents) we have students going off to PhD programs at Davis, Chicago, Wisconsin, and Colorado and visiting professor Elizabeth Wehner going off to a faculty position. Three other great students are missing from the picture (including a Watson Fellow and Fulbright Fellow). No matter their next steps, each one of the eight students contributed to making a great class of 2012. I was lucky to have them.

From left to right: Ivan Meehan, Elizabeth Wehner, me (Beth Willman), Megan Bedell, Erin Boettcher, Andrew Sturner, Steve Boughn, Jacob Gilbert. Maya Barlev, Emily Cunningham, and Annie Preston are absent from the photo. And, yes, you counted right. Six of our eight astronomy (5 majors) and astrophysics (3 majors) were women this year.

Mr. Sturner and Ms. Barlev went on to present their senior thesis work at the AAS meeting in Anchorage, AK shortly after graduation. Andrew was recognized with a Chambliss student poster award at this meeting. There is a nice article about it on Haverford’s news page. We’re so lucky to have the Green Fund supporting student travel to present the results of their research at national conferences.

Three students (Erica Hopkins and Mariah Baker – class of 2014; Erin Boettcher – class of 2012) are now working hard in my lab to get a paper ready to submit to Astronomical Journal presenting the results our time-series observations of Segue 2 and 3 at the KPNO 0.9m telescope. About 10 Haverford students have participated in this project – from obtaining and analyzing the data, to simulating the detectability of RR Lyrae stars. I’ll be proud to have such an all-star co-author list!