HMC Astronomy News and Notes
1) New arrivals to the HMC astronomy group include Doug Williams, a postdoctoral fellow hired by my NSF CAREER grant (see #3 below) to help build a near-infrared (NIR) camera for the 1.0-m telescope at Table Mountain and Mary Barsony of UC, Riverside. Dr. Barsony will be a visiting faculty member at HMC for the next 18 months to assist in the development and use of the camera. The camera is being funded by a joint grant of the Advanced Technology and Instrumentation (ATI) and Research at Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) programs of the Astronomy division of theNational Science Foundation. The grant was authored by myself (P.I.), Dr. Barsony, Bryan Penprase and Alma Zook of Pomona College, and Steve Naftilan of the Joint Sciences Department of Scripps, Pitzer, and Claremont-McKenna Colleges.
Both Drs. Williams and Barsony will be involved in supervising student research. Students will be involved with analyzing observations taken with the Table Mountain 1.0-m telescope and other telescopes. Students will also be assisting with the development and construction of the NIR camera.
2) Four Harvey Mudd College Undergraduates attended the January 1998 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. All four presented their work in poster papers. They were (together with the titles of their posters):
Their posters can be viewed in the hallway outside Freshman lab (Keck 127) or in the Astronomy Imaging Laboratory (Keck 125).David Gibson, Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Core Extinction Map. Gwen R. Bell, Mass of the Milky Way and Dwarf Spheroidal Stream Membership (with Steve Levine of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Flagstaff). Kevin Moore, An Empirical Determination of the Ionizing Fluxes of Wolf-Rayet Stars (with Kathy Eastwood of Northern Arizona University). Allison A. Elliott, PPN Gamma Results from the NEAR Conjunction (with Ron Hellings and J.K. Miller of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory). 3) I am currently in the second year of a five-year, $365,000 National Science Foundation grant from the Young Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Program. The grant is entitled "A Study of Galactic Structure and Evolution" and pays for the salary of a postdoctoral fellow for three years, as well as summer undergraduate students to assist in this research.
4) In the past year I been working on a Mellon project to use astronomical databases on the Internet to introduce non-optical astronomy to Astronomy 101, the Observational Astronomy course. In particular, I developed a computer project for the students to study the effects of interstellar dust using two methods and two different astronomical databases.
The first method used star counts to estimate the visual extinction towards an interstellar dust cloud (the more dust along a given line of sight, the fewer stars will be visible). The stellar positions and magnitudes were taken from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO-A) star catalog, a digitized version of over 12,000,000 stars from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, and the ESO Southern Sky Survey.
The second method used the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) data as a measure of emission from dust in the same cloud. A correlation was found between the visual exctinction and the dust optical depth. This correlation was then used to determine a number of cloud properties, including the cloud mass and density.
5) In the Fall of 1995, I attended a conference at the University of Maryland on the topic of Cosmic Abundances. I gave a talk entitled, "Abundance Measurements in the Outer Galaxy," about my work measuring the abundances of Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Sulfer in the outer parts of the Milky Way.
I was assisted in this work in the summer of 1995 by three Harvey Mudd students, Travis Norsen, Nemo Nicholas, and Tim Liggett. This summer Travis and Nemo accompanied me to Hawaii on an observing trip. We flew on three flights aboard NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO). To learn more about airborne astronomy, see the page on the KAO's successor, the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).
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