Astronoblog

The Haverford Public Observing Program hosted a Halloween-themed open house last weekend. Despite the rainy weather, we had a great turn out; over seventy guests joined us for a night of fun science!

Our liquid nitrogen station led by Rui, Derrick, and Eric, was a popular destination! Learning about the physical properties of this cold liquid becomes even more exciting when the liquid nitrogen helps young scientists make ice cream! Yum!

Rui and Derrick are ready for the visitors!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Liquid nitrogen at work, captivating young scientists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Young visitors eagerly await the liquid nitrogen ice cream!

 

 

 

 

 

Across the room, Lyn, Mike, and Chris manned the Messy Mars station. Young scientists were invited to learn about Martian water presence and surface morphology via their own hands on experiments with some sand!

Some Brownies observe the Messy Mars demo.

 

 

 

 

 

Tamar and Matteo invited visitors to learn about neutron stars by making clay pulsars! Meanwhile, Cora and Rachel led some planetary crafts, while Alison and Arjun performed an exciting eclipse demo.

Fun with clay pulsars

 

Craft table!

 

Alison interacts with a guest during the eclipse demo.

 

 

 

 

 

A highlight of the night was Dan Deluzio’s (2015) exciting astronomy talk. He fielded numerous questions about black holes after sparking everyone’s interest.

Guests engaged in Dan’s spooky talk!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all of our wonderful visitors who attended despite the weather; you all made the night fun for the Haverford volunteers! And thanks to the volunteers for your time and enthusiasm.

We hope to see you all at our next event (weather permitting) on November 15 at 6:30 when we open the telescopes for some observing!

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

We have a few more pictures and anecdotes to share from our trip to Kitt Peak. After a productive Thursday night of observing, we drove to the 2.5 – m telescope  around 2 AM to meet John Thorstensen, a Haverford alumnus who is a professor at Dartmouth. On Friday morning, we drove into Tucson for lunch and a trip to the Tucson Desert Museum. I highly recommend visiting this museum; much of it is outdoors, and it hosts a myriad of local animals and plant life.

 

Here we are at the Tucson Desert Museum,

And here is one of the friends we made there. After touring the desert and returning to Kitt Peak for another night of observing, we toured the 4 – m telescope. We walked out of the control room and into the dome just as a group of tourists came up the stairs; they thought we were resident scientists!

A few people in the tour group asked for Jonathan’s autograph; this was definitely a highlight of the trip.

We miss Kitt Peak already. Expect more posts soon about our observing experiences and the undergrad astronomy experience.

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

Yesterday, five Haverford astronomers arrived at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, with a few observing objectives. We flew into Tuscon during Tuesday, and drove to Kitt Peak yesterday after grabbing groceries for the week.

Here we (Matteo Miazzo, Chris Garling, Lee Rosenthal, and Alison Marqusee, minus Jonathan, who took the photo) are at the entrance to KPNO. The mountains in Arizona are awe inspiring, as are the telescopes.

The Mayall 4 – meter telescope dominates this picture, but we have views like this one most everywhere on the mountain. This week, we are observing on the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope. Haverford belongs to the WIYN consortium, a group of schools that share time on a 3.5 – meter and a 0.9 – meter telescope. We are hoping to observe the Persei twin globular clusters and maybe a few other Galactic objects of interest. We set up the 0.9 – meter last night, and although we had to close up early due to technical difficulties we learned plenty about how to operate the telescope.

Alison was the first to fill the liquid nitrogen dewer for the S2KB camera last night, and we look forward to taking data tonight!

We explored the 4 – meter telescope this morning, and got to see the 500 – ton dome rotate about this behemoth of a machine.

We will be here until Sunday morning, and will keep the blog updated with our astronomical adventures!

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

On Friday September 26, Haverford’s Public Observing Program hosted its first event of the semester! Our planet-themed evening featured crafts, a talk, and telescope observing of planets. We welcomed over 100 guests, including local members of the community and Haverford College students and professors!

The skies were clear and both telescopes were open for observing. Visitors were able to admire Saturn and its rings in addition to Mars, the Red Planet.

Guests packed into our library to engage in craft activities, modelling their own planetary creations out of clay, or being creative with paper and glitter.

Five year old Owen and his mom are regulars at our observing events. Here they show off their event t-shirts and Owen’s clay model of the earth!

Astrophysics major Carolyn Oehrig ’15 wrapped up the evening with an exciting presentation about the quest for planets outside our own solar system. She emphasized the amount of data astronomers will continue to analyze in order to identify other stars with planets. Scientists are on the hunt for “Goldilocks Planets” similar to Earth which may support life. These Goldilocks Planets lie in the hospitable zone, meaning they lie at ideal distances from theirs stars so they could have liquid water.  Further their masses are similar to Earth so that the planets may support similar atmospheres.

Here is a snapshot of Carolyn’s Prezi presentation!

Congrats to Lee and the 2014-15 team of volunteers who hosted a great first event! And a bigger thank you to all of our guests! We hope to see you on November 1 for our next open house event!

 

Last Friday, Haverford’s astronomy outreach program hosted our last event of the semester at the Strawbridge Observatory, in coordination with the Philadelphia Science Festival. Intermittent rain kept us from opening the telescopes, but we had a whole host of activities set up for our visitors, of which there were plenty. I (Lee) was downstairs running a spectroscopy demonstration and explaining how astronomers can learn about stars by looking at their spectra. Also downstairs were Estella, Sarah, and Eric, who made air-propelled rockets with straw and paper; we had plenty of fun learning about pressure physics while trying to hit makeshift targets with our rockets.

Upstairs, Andrea and Rui helped our guests make paper shuttle crafts and have plenty of other fun with arts and crafts. Lyn and Catherine ran an astronomy trivia session, and Meg showcased our fantastic new outreach T-shirts and some popular science books for our visitors to browse through. (You can email Beth Willman at bwillman@haverford.edu if you want an outreach T-shirt!)

  

Alison and Chris worked in the library, and did a great job of explaining eclipses using a baseball, a soccer ball, and a bare lamp. Arjun, Sarah S., and Eric had the delicious job of making ice cream for our guests, using liquid nitrogen and all the sweet ingredients we could get our hands on. They showcased the awesome properties of supercool gases by concocting entire batches of ice cream within minutes, and freezing an assortment of random objects; watching Arjun and Sarah fence with frozen roses was one highlight of the night.

  

Thanks so much to all of our visitors for joining us on Friday night, and to all of our volunteers for contributing to a great semester of science, education, and fun! Special thanks to Beth Willman, the faculty supervisor of the astronomy outreach program, and to Mariah Baker, our senior student supervisor and the mastermind behind all of our events. Thanks for orchestrating a fantastically successful semester and making sure that our events ran smoothly. We look forward to resuming our outreach program in the fall!

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

Last night, Haverford hosted another successful outreach event at the Strawbridge observatory. Andrea set up an ingenious arts & crafts project; each participant used a small battery, two LED lights, some string, and some clay to make their own pulsar! (A pulsar is a superdense, rapidly spinning remnant of a dead star.)

 

Some people were pretty creative with their pulsar production…

 

We also brought out tried-and-true activities, such as crafting Saturn’s rings and inflating a balloon-based universe. Afterwards, Eric gave a fantastic talk on pulsars, and why they can be so puzzling to astronomers. I bet some of our visitors left the observatory feeling inspired to learn more.

 

Thankfully, the sky was perfectly clear last night, so we opened up both the 16-inch and the 12-inch telescopes for observation. A couple of volunteers pointed the telescopes at a couple of visible objects in the sky, and gave each of our visitors a chance to observe. I’ve never seen Jupiter and its four largest moons as clearly as I did last night.

Thanks to all of our volunteers for helping out, and to all of our visitors for showing up. Our next event will be on April 25th, in coordination with the Philadelphia Science Festival. Expect it to be our most educational and exciting one yet!

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

 

[Please be in touch with Tianyi Yang – tyang@haverford.edu – and Beth Willman – bwillman@haverford.edu – if you are interested in higher resolution versions of these images. Image credit should be given to Tianyi Yang (Haverford College, Class of 2015).]

There are four telescopes in APO, the ARC 3.5m telescope, one remotely-operable 0.5m small aperture telescope called ARCSAT, one 1m telescope belonging to New Mexico State University, and the 2.5m Sloan Foundation telescope which is used for Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). All of our observations were done in the ARC 3.5m telescope, and here are some pictures of it.

 

The light in the dome is the bright quartz light that we used to do dome flats. When we observe the stars, all lights in the telescope should be turned off. Here is what the telescope looks like under long exposure. (We rotated the dome to aim at different objects.)

The ARC 3.5 m telescope carries a secret weapon: the Apollo system. This system can shoot a beam of laser pulses to the moon, and receive the light signal reflected by the mirrors placed by Apollo astronauts and Soviet Union rovers on the moon. Because the moon is extraordinarily bright, to observe only the laser coming back from the moon, scientists use the green laser and a narrow band green filter in the receiver to filter out the light of the moon. Here is what it like when Apollo is firing.

Now here are some pictures of the other telesopes. This is one of the two small aperture telescope. The two telescopes are in identical looking domes, but separated by around 10 meters.

And here are some pictures of the SDSS telescopes in the dark. The three people near the telescope are Christ, Kai and Eric.

In this picture, the shiny city is El Paso, and we can clearly see the light pollution caused by the city (although it looks pretty in the picture).

Finally, don’t forget the Solar telescope which is used to study the spectrum of the sun!

 

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

 

 

 

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.

We were scheduled for three first half nights of observing here at Apache Point Observatory, which means a 7pm – 1am time slot for using the 3.5m telescope. Luckily, we had great observing conditions our first two nights, but our third night we had pretty cruddy conditions, with seeing consistently over two arcseconds.

Our first night, we obtained images using SPICam in four different bands, h-alpha, g, r and R. We took time series observations of four fields around the dwarf galaxy Segue I, which will contribute more data to the light curves of the RR Lyrae variable stars in this galaxy. We also looked at a newly discovered galaxy. Here is a sample of one of the science images we obtained:

 

Our second and third nights of observing we switched to DIS to get spectra of a few different eclipsing binaries and some candidate M Giant stars. From the spectra of the candidate M Giants we will be able to find their distances, which will assist in the mapping of the outer reaches of the Milky Way. We were also able to observe the contact binary V535 Aur at quadrature, the point where the two stars composing the binary pair are farthest from each other in the sky, which was very exciting! Here is a sample of a spectrum we obtained from DIS:

 

On the third night, we hoped to observe some RR Lyrae in the dwarf galaxy Ursa Major II that were found by students working at Haverford this past summer, but unfortunately they were too faint to be observed under less than stellar observing conditions.

While observing, some of the students have already been working on reducing our data in IRAF to prepare it for analysis.

This is the reduced spectrum for the eclipsing binary WY Tau (props to Kai Faris). Absorption lines are clearly visible in the blackbody spectrum, and the high signal to noise makes us all very happy astronomers! Tonight, after we complete our final night of observing, the 3.5m telescope is being used in a mission to measure the precise distance to the moon by aiming a laser at the moon and timing the return of reflected photons, so we will be able to go outside and watch a laser be shot at the moon.

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.