PBS NOVA appearance

In the 2017, a film crew came to one of our group meetings. My advisor introduced them as a team from PBS's NOVA science channel and said they would like to get some footage of astronomy in action.

It was about one hour of filming that would be edited into the final episode and the team did a fantastic job. Our specific role was to show how exoplanets are studied and to give people an idea of which types of planets are most interesting to astronomers looking for planets that can host life (particularly as we know it).

Seeing this episode also reminded me of how long my hair used to be last year. I'll probably grow it out again someday:

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My "thoughtful exoplanet finding" look, featuring: more hair than I currently have.

:^)

Kitt Peak National Observatory

I've spent the last couple nights (in February [just doing some catch-up writing]) at Kitt Peak National Observatory co-observing a group of stars with another grad student and a postdoc.

Despite the flipped sleep schedule, I really enjoy doing observing runs. They give me another opportunity to learn about the telescopes we use and provide me with a new environment to do some altitude training.

There are also nice sunsets.

:^)

Cleaning the Clay Telescope's mirror

The Clay Telescope was built on the roof of Harvard's Science Center in 2007. Since then, its primary mirror has never been cleaned. A small group of graduate students, including myself, and one of the scientists at the Center for Astrophysics decided to spend a couple hours one afternoon to clean the Clay's primary mirror.

In some cases, telescope mirrors have their thin coating of aluminum completely "cleaned" (removed) and are re-aluminized to reproduce their original reflectivity.

We just used soapy water and cotton swabs.

Before that, though, we had to dismount the telescope's camera and take the mirror off the main body. There are some pictures below of the dismounted camera and of the secondary mirror seen through the bottom of the telescope.

The process was pretty straightforward and beside a few streak marks, the mirror looks great (or at least much better than it did before).

A before and after shot of the Clay Telescope's mirror.

Hopefully the next cleaning will be sooner than 2027.

:^)

Another night at the Clay

There are summer classes at Harvard that occasionally need to use the Clay Telescope located on campus. Normally the telescope operator or the class instructor is able to run the telescope, but sometimes, "observers on call" (aka some of the grad students here) are summoned when there is more help needed. 

I took the chance to help out for two nights in a row for some of the summer classes, which primarily consist of high school students. I'm particularly grateful for these observing opportunities because most of the past 4 months have been rainy and cloudy and generally just bad for observing. The past two nights were very clear and that resulted in some great images of Jupiter, Saturn, the moon, and the Hercules Cluster:

The Hercules Cluster and Saturn are shown in RGB color images while the moon is shown in ultraviolet light (remembering that the moon is reflected sunlight, which isn't as bright in UV light, minimizing saturation of the camera).

After so many cloudy nights, I'd say my yearning for some good telescope time has been satisfied. 

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This is the moon as seen through the 40mm eyepiece.

:^)

The Clay Telescope

Back in spring this year I started volunteering for the Harvard Observing Project (HOP). Each semester, HOP chooses a target to observe with the Clay Telescope in order to publish new data as part of a scientific article. The data are* analyzed by graduate or undergraduate students at the end of the semester and there are usually 7-10 HOP volunteers to help collect the data.

*a physics professor once told me that "data" is a plural term.

Another great part of HOP is that we have our sessions open to other students at Harvard and any guests they want to bring. This means we'll look at 3-5 different celestial objects over a night, including the special science targets. Here is a picture of the Clay Telescope in its dome:

I know it appears like we were just pointing the telescope at some clouds. We were. The hope was that the clouds would pass so that we could observe our science target for the fall semester: KIC 8462852. That's not a toll-free phone number, but a naming scheme devised for the Kepler Space Telescope. KIC is an acronym for the Kepler Input Catalog and the number following it distinguishes between stars put into the catalog. This star became more popular than your typical KIC object when astronomers noticed something weird happening to the light from the star. Long story short, some people believe the star hosts an alien megastructure. This "explains" what's happening to the light from the star as we see it from Earth, but there are certainly more viable theories like there being an excessive amount of rocky or dusty debris orbiting the star. This is always a fun story to tell our visitors to the Clay during our HOP nights.

On clearer nights, we've gotten pictures of other things like the Andromeda Galaxy, Ring Nebula, and the Moon:

This picture was made using 3 separate images taken in red, green, and blue filters. The filters only let in one color of light and each image is then assigned a color (scaled from 0 to 255 with RGB sliders).

Andromeda is in the top right corner of this image. I'm not really sure why we chose it to be there. Maybe it was a late-night attempt to make an aesthetic statement. Or maybe it was because it was late at night and we didn't want to center the telescope. Hmm.

A close up of the moon. The moon is so bright that this image was taken with a 0.1 second exposure. We also used the ultraviolet light filter to only allow UV light in since the moon does not shine as brightly in that light as it does in other colors. I eventually had this printed onto a mousepad.

All of these are taken with the Clay Telescope's CCD. It is the small box with the four silver X's in the picture. The CCD is 1024 by 1024 pixels and does a pretty great job at finding faint celestial objects considering our proximity to Boston and all of the city light.

I'm excited to see what new target we'll be looking at in the Spring.

:^)

Astronaut Jeff Hoffman and Professor Stephen Hawking

I wrote this post a very long time ago (Spring 2016) and didn't quite get around to publishing it. My excuse would be something like my marathon training was just starting to go in full swing, but I think I just lost a bit of motivation to keep blogging. Anyway, more on all of the marathon stuff/baking things to come (more consistently, I hope)...

Spring 2016 post:

The end of my first year of grad classes was amazing. So amazing that it seems to have taken me a month or so [Edit: actually more like forever] of reflection to finally get a post out about it!

There is one week in particular towards the end of April where I got to see one talk by Stephen Hawking and then another by former NASA astronaut Jeff Hoffman. Professor Hawking gave his talk about black holes and a new institute near the Center for Astrophysics called The Black Hole Initiative. With the detection of gravitational wave from the LIGO experiment, the people at The Black Hole Initiative are getting together now to further the study of these mysterious objects. I found Professor Hawking's talk absolutely amazing and I was surprised at how well he made the talk accessible to the public and yet infused enough detail in it for me to learn so much.

One blurry photo (we weren't allowed to take them during the talk; here's an article with a better professional one) showing Stephen Hawking and the mural, painted by another astronomer, that now resides at the Black Hole Initiative building.

The main point I took away from his talk was that black holes seem to change the information about the things that fall in--the black hole information paradox. That is, the quantum information about the things that fall in is somehow different from entry to when the black hole evaporates, relinquishing this information through Hawking Radiation. Once this information escapes this way, one cannot tell if this is the quantum information of a star the was engulfed by the black hole or just some cosmic dust that fell in. It's in the top three strangest things about astronomy for me; right with dark matter and dark energy, naturally. At least with this and the new tools the community has, I feel like we're closer to understanding black holes than those other two dark things.

A few days later, just as I was cooling off from all of that excitement, I got an email with the subject line:

Astrophysicist turned astronaut talk tonight

This piqued my curiosity and I read the rest of the email detailing that Jeff Hoffman, a former astronaut, would be speaking at a venue just down the street from where I lived. Despite the short notice, it didn't take much else for me to make room in my schedule to go see this.

Jeff had many fascinating stories to tell including how he began his career as an astrophysicist and how this is what led him to becoming an astronaut as opposed to the more common path requiring astronauts to have military fighter pilot training. But the most amazing (and a complete surprise to me) story he had to tell was how he flew STS-61--the space shuttle walk that restored vision to the Hubble Space Telescope! My favorite part about this story was how he received instructions from mission control that amounted to him wiggling some part inside the telescope to get it unstuck. A trivial task a face value, but remember, he did this while in space (and while working with a multi-billion dollar instrument). Jeff said that for all the research he did and now continues do to at MIT, he feels that this space mission is the most he's contributed to the astronomy community given the telescope's enormous impact on the research many other astronomers do.

Between these two talks, that was one of the most space-filled weeks I've ever had and I hope there will be more to come.

:^)