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ASTRONOMY DEPARTMENT AND THE HOPKINS OBSERVATORY

Faculty included Karen B. Kwitter, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Astronomy and Chair; Jay M. Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Hopkins Observatory; and Dr. Steven Souza, Instructor in Astronomy and Observatory Supervisor. During WSP 2003, adjunct Dr. Joshua Winn of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics taught a very popular course on cosmology. The Department graduated six astrophysics majors in 2003: Naila Baloch, Wei-Li Deng, Kathleen Gibbons, Christopher Holmes, Kristen Shapiro, and Megan VanDyke. Incoming senior astrophysics majors are Paul Crittenden, Jesse Dill, Robertson Follansbee, Matthew Hoffman, Martin Mudd, Lissa Ong, Davis Stevenson, David Ticehurst and Galen Thorp; Sarah Croft is an incoming senior astronomy major. Incoming juniors are Ryan Carollo, Zophia Edwards, Kamen Kozarev, and Terry-Ann Suer. Kristen Shapiro ’03 received the Milham Prize in Astronomy, was elected an Associate Member of Sigma Xi, had been elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and graduated magna cum laude with high honors in Astrophysics.
Hubble Space Telescope images taken on May 20, Sept. 2, Oct. 28 and Dec. 17, 2002 of light echoes from Star V838 Monocerotis. The change in appearance is not due to motion of the material in the observed dust shell, but rather to the fact that light from the outburst is reaching successively more distant parts of the shell and reflecting from the dust found there.
[NASA, ESA and H. E. Bond (STScl)•STScl-PRC03-10]
The Astronomy Department offered two new courses this year. In the spring semester, Kwitter taught Between the Stars (ASTR 402), a heavily observational course concentrating on the interstellar medium, its composition, origin, behavior, and galactic context. We were fortunate to be able to include two visits by guest lecturers during the semester. Dr. Howard Bond of the Space Telescope Science Institute spoke about the unique and fascinating object V838 Monocerotis (Fig. 1). The dust shell surrounding this star has been illuminated by a sudden, flashbulb-like brightening of the star, yielding a CAT-scan-like time-series of images that reveal the three-dimensional structure of the dust shell. (See <http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/2003/10/>.) Kwitter was consulted by astronomers at STScI and was quoted in several magazines and websites as an expert commentator on this object. The class also had a visit from Dr. Martín Guerrero of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who discussed high-energy X-ray and ultraviolet observations of the interstellar medium with the space observatories ROSAT, Chandra, XMM, and FUSE. Also in the spring, Pasachoff taught the new course Science, Pseudoscience, and the Two Cultures (ASTR 336), in which the students learned about various aspects of scientific culture and nonscientific practices, both by reading and by interviewing local practitioners.
Planetary nebulae are the cast-off gas shells of medium mass stars between about 0.1 and eight times the mass of the sun. Their spectra reveal their chemical compositions, which may be affected by the nuclear processes that went on previously inside the parent star. Kwitter’s research on the chemical composition of planetary nebulae continued with several publications detailing the behavior of sulfur, chlorine, and argon, elements that are not expected to be affected by nuclear processing in the nebulae’s parent stars, and therefore serve as markers for the composition of the original stellar material. With colleague Richard Henry of the University of Oklahoma, Kwitter will use these observed abundances to compare and to test theoretical models of stellar nucleosynthesis yields and galactic evolution. In collaboration with Jacquelynne Milingo of Gettysburg College, Kwitter and Henry have received telescope time at Kitt Peak National Observatory and at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory to examine a class of planetary nebulae that come from the more massive end of the mass range that produce planetary nebulae. The goal here is to examine in particular the abundances of nitrogen and oxygen to search for evidence that fusion near the bottom of the star’s convective envelope has resulted in the conversion of some of the oxygen into nitrogen.
At the January 2003 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Kwitter gave a presentation to the special “Astronomy 101” session about a new web-based Gallery of Planetary Nebula Spectra. This database, which incorporates a graphical package to display spectra, contains high-quality spectroscopic data on 86 planetary nebulae obtained by Kwitter and Henry. The website was designed with the help of several Williams Instructional Technology students in the summer of 2002. Kwitter developed two exercises, which are included on the website (<cf.williams.edu/public/nebulae>) to explicate the data and to illustrate basic concepts of atomic physics and radiation. The site has thus far received hundreds of unique hits.
In March 2003, Kwitter gave a presentation at Mt. Everett High School in Sheffield, MA, about her career path and research. Kwitter was also the featured speaker at the Berkshire Museum’s summer program for Massachusetts teachers; she discussed her life as an astronomer and teacher along with the experiences that influenced her. The teachers then attended an on-campus session with Kwitter, exploring the worldwide web to study recent discoveries about extra-solar planetary systems. Kwitter also participated in the College’s Summer Program for Teachers, conducting a class about the search for extra-solar planetary systems. In May, Kwitter was inducted into the Alumni Hall of Honor at Edison High School in Edison, NJ.
In the summer of 2002, Matthew Hoffman ’04, and Keck Northeast Astronomy Colloquium (KNAC) Summer Fellow Mun Keat Chan (Middlebury ’03) worked with Kwitter on high-dispersion spectroscopic observations of several planetary nebulae, aimed at determining the abundance of iron and other heavy elements in these objects. Hoffman and Chan accompanied Kwitter on an observing run at Kitt Peak National Observatory in June 2002. An early result from this study was the determination for DdDm-1, a planetary nebula located in the halo of the Milky Way Galaxy, of its radial velocity (–310±5 km/sec) and its expansion velocity (12.7±1.6 km/sec, based primarily on the wavelength splitting of forbidden lines of Fe+2). The students presented their results at the annual KNAC Student Research Symposium held at Haverford in November of 2002. For more information about KNAC, see <http://www.wellesley.edu/Astronomy/keck/>.
During the summer of 2003, Lissa Ong ’04, Davis Stevenson ‘04, and KNAC Summer Fellow Megan Roscioli (Haverford ’05) worked with Kwitter on various projects relating to spectroscopic analyses of planetary nebulae. These include analysis of high-dispersion echelle spectra of planetary nebulae to search for emission lines of heavy elements and a study of archived ultraviolet observations of a sample of planetary nebulae taken with the now-defunct International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite, in order to plan for upcoming observations of the same objects with the improved capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope. Stevenson will continue her research with Kwitter as a senior honors thesis.
Kwitter served the final year of her three-year term as a member of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy. She is an organizer of the meeting Women in Astronomy II: Ten Years After, held at Caltech at the end of June 2003. This meeting is a decadal follow-up to the groundbreaking meeting in Baltimore in 1992, at which the “Baltimore Charter” was drafted, a document urging the astronomical community to promote “a culture in which both women and men can realize their full potential in scientific careers.” On behalf of the CSWA, Kwitter undertook a comprehensive survey of the gender and rank demographics in the leading astronomical institutions and graduate departments across the country. Results from this survey will be presented at the WIA II meeting and will be compared with previous surveys.
Kwitter also continued on the Observatories Council of the Associated Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), notably as the only representative from a liberal arts college. The function of the Observatories Council is to advise AURA on the management and future direction of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO), which includes Kitt Peak National Observatory, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and the NOAO Gemini Science Center.
The National Research Council, which is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences, vets applications for postdoctoral appointments at nationally funded laboratories in their Associateship Programs Review; Kwitter has continued as a member of the Space Sciences Panel for this thrice-yearly review process. She also continues on the advisory boards of Annual Editions: Astronomy, and Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
A sequence showing three images of Pluto and the star, P131.1, taken at different times relative to their August 20 occultation event, at the 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Pasachoff resumed his liaison with Prof. James L. Elliot of MIT in observing the atmospheres of outer planets and their satellites through occultation studies. He worked through the year with Williams colleagues Bryce Babcock and Steve Souza and undergraduate David Ticehurst ’04 to observe and to study Pluto’s atmosphere with a specialized CCD detector normally used by the Williams team at total solar eclipses. Pasachoff, Souza, and Ticehurst brought the CCD and a portable telescope to Chile to prepare for the July 2002 occultation. Changing predictions and deployment needs led them to be in a position where they didn’t actually observe this occultation themselves but participated as team members in the subsequent Astronomical Journal paper. The situation was very different at the August 2002 occultation, when Pasachoff, Babcock, and Ticehurst took the eclipse CCD to the Mauna Kea Observatory, where they obtained fantastic observations of the occultation, including 2400 exposures at a 0.5 s cadence. See Fig. 2. Their visible-light observations clearly showed the occultation, revealing through later analysis that Pluto’s atmosphere has expanded since the only comparable observation in 1988. Pasachoff, Babcock, Souza, and Ticehurst are coauthors of the team’s paper in Nature and are framing a paper for the Astronomical Journal of which they will be lead authors. This later paper will elaborate, in particular, on the observations of layering in Pluto’s atmosphere, which shows up as spikes in the occultation light curve. The team also delivered a paper and was coauthor of other papers at the meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in the fall of 2002 and the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 2003. Pasachoff, Babcock, and Souza are planning future collaborations with the MIT team and are formulating joint instrument and research proposals.
The Pluto observations bear on the important question of whether Pluto’s atmosphere will freeze out in the next decade or so, making further investigations impossible for over 200 years as Pluto moves farther from the sun in its 250-year orbit. The result is therefore vital for the pending Pluto spacecraft, and the observations are leading to a major revision of astronomers’ understanding of Pluto’s atmosphere and, potentially, of its relation with the increasingly important class of objects known as Kuiper-Belt Objects.
Pasachoff headed a Williams College team that carried out observations at the total solar eclipse of December 4, 2002, which they observed from Ceduna, South Australia. They studied the temperature of the solar corona through ultraviolet mapping and made visible-light observations to compare with space extreme-ultraviolet telescopes aboard the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) and Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. Students participating included essentially all the astronomy and astrophysics majors who had not been on the Zambian, (2001) expedition: David Ticehurst ’04, Kristen Shapiro ’03, Davy Stevenson ’04, Sarah Croft ’04, Lissa Ong ’04, Galen Thorp ’04, Jesse Dill ’04, Paul Crittenden ’03, Terry-Ann Suer ’05, Kamen Kozarev ’05, John BackusMayes ’05. Alumnus Rob Wittenmyer ’98 also participated. Staff from Williams College included Bryce Babcock and Steven Souza, and they were assisted by Lee Hawkins of Appalachian State University. They were joined on site in Australia by Raymond Smartt from the U.S. National Solar Observatory, recently retired to Australia; Robert Lucas of the University of Sydney; and Stephan Martin, former Williams College Observatory Supervisor. See <.williams.edu/astronomy/eclipse>.
During the summer of 2002, KNAC Summer Fellow Mansi Kasliwal ’05 of Bryn Mawr College, now of Cornell University, worked on prior eclipse data; during the summer of 2003, KNAC Summer Fellow Peter Forshay ’05 of Haverford College, and Terry-Ann Suer ’05 began work on the 2002 eclipse data.
Pasachoff observed the annular solar eclipse of May 31, 2003, from an airplane off the north coast of Iceland. It was his 36th solar eclipse.
He continues as Chair of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Solar Eclipses. He prepared a report on the Group’s work for the IAU General Assembly held in Sydney, Australia, in July 2003. See <.totalsolareclipse.net>. He also prepared a report on the forthcoming November 23, 2003, total solar eclipse that will be visible only from Antarctica for a special symposium on Antarctic astronomy held at the IAU General Assembly.
Pasachoff also worked with Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on observations from NASA’s Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) of the 1999 transit of Mercury, continuing the work that they had reported the previous year. They submitted a final paper on the 1999 transit to the planetary-sciences journal Icarus. They obtained some observations of the 2003 transit of Mercury. But the main event will be the 2004 transit of Venus, since no transit of Venus has been visible on Earth since 1882, while there have been over a dozen transits of Mercury since then. Transits of Venus have been observed only in 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, and 1882, and in the 18th century were the main way that the size and scale of the solar system were obtained. Schneider, Pasachoff, and Golub showed that the dreaded “black-drop effect,” the ligature joining the disk of Mercury to the dark, background sky, came from a combination of the point-spread function of TRACE’s telescope and the limb darkening of the Sun. Since TRACE is outside Earth’s atmosphere and Mercury has only a negligible atmosphere, the black-drop effect is not atmospheric, which has applications to the black-drop effect that bedeviled past observations of the transits of Venus, limiting the accuracy of our knowledge of the size of the solar system. Pasachoff prepared a joint report on the observations for the special symposium on Mercury held at the 2003 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney. See <http://www.transitofvenus.info>.
Pasachoff received the 2003 Education Prize of the American Astronomical Society. The citation reads, “For his eloquent and informative writing of textbooks from junior high through college, for his devotion to teaching generations of students, for sharing with the world the joys of observing eclipses, for his many popular books and articles on astronomy, for his intense advocacy on behalf of science education in various forums, for his willingness to go into educational nooks where no astronomer has gone before, the AAS Education Prize is awarded to Jay M. Pasachoff.” The prize will be officially awarded at the meeting in Atlanta in January 2004.
Pasachoff was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, one of only fifteen such.
The Chapin Library of Rare Books of Williams College mounted an exhibition, The Heavens Revealed: Classics of Astronomy from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Einstein, May 12 through September 12, 2003. It was a display of important books in the history of astronomy, from the collection of Pasachoff, in honor of his 60th birthday and the beginning of his 32nd year of teaching at Williams College. Works on view include first editions of the Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy (1515), De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543), Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei (1610), and Astronomia Nova by Johannes Kepler (1609), as well as Albert Einstein’s paper Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie (1916). Also shown are the Pasachoff copies of great and beautiful celestial atlases by Bayer (1603), Doppelmayr (1742), Bevis (1750/86), Flamsteed (1776), and Bode (1801). The Pasachoff books were supplemented in the display by Chapin Library holdings, including a second Copernicus and the rare Epitome of Ptolemy’s Almagest by Regiomontanus (1496). A catalogue was prepared by Wayne Hammond of the Chapin Library, with a foreword, introduction and historical overview by Pasachoff and with contributions by Felix Oyens of Christie’s on the “Academic as Collector”; by Roberta J. M. Olson of the New-York Historical Society on the Nuremberg Chronicle and the joint Olson/Pasachoff studies of its comet representations; by Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on the Pasachoff holdings of Galileo’s books; by James Voelkel ’84 on Kepler; and by Roger Stoddard of Harvard’s Houghton Library on the books that the Houghton Library has been able to obtain with Pasachoff’s contributions. A supplemental contribution by Robert Volz, Custodian of the Chapin Library, lists the Chapin’s astronomical holdings.
A symposium and reception on June 28, 2003, marked the occasion of Pasachoff’s birthday. Over 100 students have been alumni of the astronomy and astrophysics program since Pasachoff came to Williams, and many attended. Eight alumni who are professionally involved in astronomy spoke: Stuart Vogel ’75, University of Maryland, “CARMA: Imaging the Cool Universe; Wayne Roberge ’76, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, “Fire and Ice: Shock Waves in Protoplanetary Disk; Eric Pilger ’82, Hawaii Institute for Geophysics, “Remote Sensing of Thermal Surface Events from Space”; Brad Behr ’92, University of Texas, “A New Spin on Old Stars; Kevin Reardon ’92, Italian National Astrophysical Institute at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Florence, “IBIS and EGSO: Building Real and Virtual Solar Instruments; Timothy McConnochie ’98, Cornell University, “Mars Global Surveyor Thermal Emission Spectrometer: Atmospheric Observations; Laura Brenneman ’99, University of Maryland, “Assessing the Accretion Disk Environment in NGC 4593 with XMM-Newton”; and Dan Seaton ’01, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “Eclipse and TRACE Solar Observations”; James Voelkel ’84 contributed a piece about Kepler’s books to the catalogue of the book exhibit.
Pasachoff continued to work with Dr. Donald A. Lubowich of the American Institute of Physics and Hofstra College on a series of observations involving cosmic deuterium. Deuterium is a uniquely sensitive tracer of the physical conditions in the era of nucleosynthesis, which began about 1 second after the Big Bang and lasted about 1000 seconds. All the deuterium in the universe was formed during that interval. Pasachoff, with students Gabriel Brammer ’02, David A. Ticehurst ’04 and Kristen Shapiro ’03, made observations the previous year with the 45-m millimeter radio telescope at the Nobeyama Radio Observatory in Japan. Among the objects studied were two gas clouds in the outer Milky Way. Subsequent observations were made on related deuterium topics with the 12-m millimeter radio telescope of the Steward Observatory on Kitt Peak and with the Haystack Radio Telescope in Westford, MA, sometimes on site and sometimes remotely. A number of deuterated molecules were detected, and the observational results are under analysis.
As a major part of his 2001-02 sabbatical at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Pasachoff had resumed work on the solar chromosphere, a long-time interest, by planning high-spatial-resolution observations with the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft. He continued to work in 2002-2003 with Dr. Ed DeLuca and Dr. Leon Golub of the CfA, who are major figures in the TRACE program, to prepare a grant application to NASA to participate in the work. Seaton ’01, who is working for the TRACE group at CfA, had made some preliminary measurements on existing TRACE data, showing the feasibility of the project. Dr. Klaus Wilhelm, former head of the SUMER project on SOHO, and Dr. Goran Scharmer, of the New Swedish Solar Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands, have agreed to make joint observations of spicules with the Pasachoff team.
TRACE provides constant seeing, allowing chromospheric spicules at the solar limb to be followed accurately over time and thus provide an improvement to Pasachoff’s earlier observations of spicule dynamics and spectra. Because the mass in spicules is enough to replace the corona in a brief time though coronal mass is not replaced so quickly, solar physicists have accepted that most of the spicules return to lower levels of the solar atmosphere, though they still discuss whether it is on ballistic or magnetically guided trajectories. Studying the registered images of spicules in ultraviolet chromospheric and coronal spectral lines should allow distinguishing between changes in direction of the spicular gas and the advance of an ionization front.
Pasachoff continued his collaboration with Dr. Roberta J. M. Olson on the overlap of art and astronomy leading to a publication in Meteoritics. They began a paper to be presented at the 2004 meeting of the College Art Association about Galileo’s drawings of the Moon and other objects, dealing with the relation of Galileo and the Medici court.
Pasachoff collaborated with Kevin Kilburn of the Manchester Astronomical Society, U.K., on describing the contents and physical distribution of the unpublished but beautiful 18th-century star atlas by John Bevis. Prof. Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics joined them for an article published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy.
Pasachoff continued as the Williams College representative to the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium, which is headquartered at M.I.T., and which Williams recently joined. Other members include Boston University, the Charles Stark Draper Lab, Harvard University, Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Five College Astronomy Department, Northeastern University, the Boston Museum of Science, and the McAuliffe/Challenger Center.
Pasachoff continued as Vice-President of the Commission for Education and Development of the International Astronomical Union. He participated in deliberations of the Scientific Organizing Committee for plans for the Commission’s sessions at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney, Australia, in July 2003, including a special symposium on K-12 teaching of astronomy. Pasachoff became President of the Commission at the Sydney IAU meeting. He also continued as Chair of the Commission’s Program Group on Public Education at the Time of Eclipses. See <http://www.eclipses.info>.
Pasachoff continues on the science board of the World Book and as consulting editor for astronomy of the McGraw-Hill Scientific Encyclopedia and Yearbooks. He is on the Council of Advisors of the Astronomy Education Review electronic journal. See <http://aer.noao.edu/>. Pasachoff continues as science book reviewer for The Key Reporter, the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter. He continues as advisor to the children’s magazine Odyssey.
The second edition of Pasachoff’s text The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, with Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley as co-author, was published in May 2003. See <http://info.brookscole.com/pasachoff/>. Pasachoff worked with Milos Mladenovic of the Williams College Center for Information Technology to post regular updates and press releases on a wide variety of astronomical topics on the Web at <http://www.solarcorona.net>.
Pasachoff wrote an informal book on solar physics, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Sun (Alpha Books, 2003), <http://www.solarcorona.net/sun>. The second Spanish edition of Pasachoff’s Field Guide to the Stars and Planets: Guía de Campo de las Estrellas y los Planetas was published by Ediciones Omega S.A., Plató, 26, 08006 Barcelona, Spain.
Dr. Steven Souza took the position of Observatory Supervisor and Instructor in July. He directs the department’s observing program, supervising nine teaching assistants. This program offers varied nighttime and solar observing experiences for introductory students. He has been working to increase opportunities for quantitative measurements by advanced students, with the goal of offering similarly concrete exercises in introductory courses. He handles most of the daytime observing, and has hosted numerous visiting individuals and groups, including Friday-night planetarium groups, alumni, visiting classes from Williams (e.g., Geosciences 420T) and elsewhere, and student previews and prospective students. He trains the observing and planetarium TAs in the use of our facilities, including the 0.6-m telescope. Souza also teaches all laboratory sections in the department. He is in the process of revising or replacing many of the existing laboratory exercises to make use of modern software, Web resources, and new data.
During the summer of 2002, Kamen Kozarev ’05 and Lissa Ong ’04 worked with Souza on detailed characterization of the Observatory’s scientific-grade CCD cameras. During the summer of 2003 Ryan Carollo ’05 began high-quality observations of the Sun, and Galen Thorp ’04 did preliminary work aimed at reducing the effects of atmospheric “seeing” on the Observatory’s 0.6-m reflector. Earlier, Souza began occasional monitoring of the “seeing” and found that it is predictably poor, varying between 3 and 6 arc seconds (at a good site it can be as low as 0.5 to 1 arc second). Thorp will continue this work as his senior honors thesis.
Souza has completed or initiated numerous improvements to the Observatory instrumentation and facilities. These include realuminization of the 0.6-m telescope primary and secondary mirrors (after 11 years!), acquisition and installation of a major upgrade to the 0.6-m telescope control computer, enabling highly automated graphical pointing, adjustment of the telescope pointing models permitting very accurate pointing and tracking, replacement of a damaged set of standard UBVRI photometric filters, and acquisition of new narrowband interference filters for nebular imaging, replacement of the telescope control room air conditioner (whew!), restoring to operation the department’s Small Radio Telescope, and restoring to operation our Model 10C astronomical spectrograph.
In particular, Souza’s work enabled the 14 students in Kwitter’s Between the Stars (ASTR 402) to make use of the full complement of the Observatory’s instruments, including the radio telescope (to measure the rotation of the Milky Way galaxy) and the spectrograph (to obtain temperatures and densities of a variety of planetary nebulae). With the assistance of students Lissa Ong ’04, John BackusMayes ’05, and Ryan Carollo ’05, Souza has been renovating our venerable Carroll spar solar telescope, a fine refractor well suited to high-quality H-alpha observations of the Sun. In addition to a complete teardown, cleanup, and repainting, the tracking system that keeps the instrument pointing accurately at the Sun (known as a “limb guider”) will be replaced with modern detectors and electronics.
In 2002, Souza participated in two Williams College expeditions to observe occultations of stars by the planet Pluto. In July, he traveled with Pasachoff and David Ticehurst ’04 to Chile to observe the event with a portable 0.36-m telescope. In addition to preparing the equipment in collaboration with Dr. Bryce Babcock and Ticehurst, Souza designed a system to add GPS-based accuracy to a timing system previously designed by Babcock. No observation was made due to last-minute changes in the predicted path of Pluto’s shadow. A second event in August was successfully observed from Mauna Kea Observatory by Pasachoff, Babcock, and Ticehurst. Souza assisted with preparations for that expedition, and with analysis of the resulting data.
Souza also participated in the 2002 solar eclipse expedition to Ceduna, Australia. He handled much of the equipment planning and logistics for the expedition and its aftermath. He also led a Williams team including Jesse Dill ’04 and Lissa Ong ’04 in a successful observation of the solar corona for direct comparison with near-simultaneous observations taken by the SOHO spacecraft. These data were published on the Web by NASA immediately after the eclipse. In June 2003, Souza traveled to Kitt Peak National Observatory to work with Dr. J. Milingo (a collaborator of Kwitter at Gettysburg College) on spectroscopy of planetary nebulae. Souza gave a guest lecture in Interstellar Molecules (ASTR 402). He also gave a guest lecture in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CHEM 304). He attended the KNAC (Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium) faculty meeting in July at Vassar College, and the KNAC Student Symposium at Haverford College in November. He rejoined the American Astronomical Society after a hiatus of over 15 years. Souza is Steve #304 of the National Center for Science Education’s Project Steve (http://www.ncseweb.org) in support of the teaching of evolution.
Souza has upgraded and/or maintained most of the 16 computers in the Observatory and in the Astronomy teaching lab. He acts as liaison between the department and OIT and represents the Astronomy Department in thrice-yearly “SciTech” meetings. He has begun the process of standardizing the department on Mac OS X, retiring the Linux machines by the end of summer 2003. Souza has assumed responsibility for the Astronomy Department website. New pages were added for the 2002 and 2003 total and annular eclipses in Mexico, Australia, and Iceland, and for department news and events.
Souza co-authored the Instructor’s Manual and Test Bank to accompany The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium (2nd Edition) – Jay M. Pasachoff and Steven P. Souza – Brooks-Cole [2003].
ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIA
[Colloquia are held jointly with Physics. See Physics section for additional listings.]
Dr. Howard Bond, Space Telescope Science Institute, Class of 1960 Scholars Program
“Hubble Space Telescope Observations of the Light Echo Around V838 Monocerotis: An Astronomical CAT Scan”
Dr. Vojtech Rusin, Slovak Academy of Sciences
“Recent Solar Eclipses”
Dr. Joris Gerssen, Space Telescope Science Institute
“A Search for Black Holes in Globular Clusters”
Dr. Martín Guerrero, University of Illinois, Class of 1960 Scholars Program
“X-ray Bubbles: From Planetary Nebulae to Superbubbles”
Dr. Joshua Winn, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
“Measuring the Universe with Gravitational Lenses”
Dr. Norman J. Levitt, Rutgers University, (public lecture in coordination with Astronomy 336, with co-sponsorship by the Lecture Committee)
“Science as the Mirror of Democracy”
OFF-CAMPUS FACULTY PRESENTATIONS
Pasachoff, J.M. Souza, S.P. Ticehurst, D.R. with Buie, et al
“Changes in Pluto’s Atmosphere Revealed by the P126A Occultation”
abstract for the Division of Planetary Sciences, American Astronomical Society, October, Birmingham, AL; Bull. Am. Astron. Soc. 34, No. 3, 877, [2002]
Pasachoff, J.M. Babcock, B.A. Ticehurst, D.R. with Elliot et al
“Pluto Occultation of P131.1 in 2002 August: Overview of Observations and Infrared Results”
abstract for 201st AAS meeting, Seattle, January 2003, 61.01; B.A.A.S. 34, No. 4, 1211 [2002]
Pasachoff, J.M., Babcock, B.A., Ticehurst, D.R. with Elliot et al
“High-Time-Resolution White-Light Observations of Pluto’s Occultation of P131.1 in 2002 August”
abstract for 201st AAS meeting, Seattle, January 2003, 61.02; B.A.A.S. 34, No. 4, 1211 [2002]
Pasachoff, J.M., Babcock, B.A., Ticehurst, D.R. with Person et al
“Examination of Pluto’s Figure with the P131.1 Stellar Occultation”
Abstract for 201st AAS meeting, Seattle, January 2003, 61.03; B.A.A.S. 34, No. 4, 1211-12 [2003]
Kwitter, K.B.
“Exercises to Accompany a Web-Based Gallery of Planetary Nebula Spectra and Their Use in Introductory Classes”
presented at the “Astronomy 101” special session of the AAS meeting in Seattle, WA [2003]
“The Making of a Scientist”
The Berkshire Museum’s Museum Institute for Teaching Science
Mt. Everett High School
Kwitter, K.B. and Henry, R.B.C.
“An Interactive Gallery of Planetary Nebula Spectra”
abstract for 201st AAS meeting, Seattle, January 2003, 88.16; B.A.A.S. 34, No. 4, 1251
Kwitter, K.B. with Milingo et al
“Sulfur, Chlorine and Argon Abundances in Planetary Nebulae III: Observations and Results for a Final Sample”
abstract for 201st AAS meeting, Seattle, January 2003, 881.16; B.A.A.S. 4, No. 4, 1251-1252 [2003]
OFF-CAMPUS STUDENT PRESENTATIONS
13th Annual Undergraduate Symposium and on Research in Astronomy, November 2002, held at Haverford College and sponsored by the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium
Matthew Hoffman ’04 and Mun Chan (Middlebury College ’03)
“Forbidden Iron Lines in Planetary Nebulae and the Radial and Expansion Velocities of the Halo Planetary Nebula DdDm 1”
Kamen Kozarev ’05, and Lissa Ong ’04
“Characterization of Hopkins Observatory CCDs”
Martin Mudd ’04
“Searching for Galactic Streams”
Kristen Shapiro ’03
“Stellar Velocity Dispersions in Nearby Spiral Galaxies”
Terry-Ann Suer ’05
“Optical Variability of the Quasar 3C273”
David Ticehurst ’04
“In the Shadow of Pluto”
POSTGRADUATE PLANS OF ASTROPHYSICS & ASTRONOMY MAJORS
Naila Baloch
Undecided
Wei-Li Deng
Travel
Kathleen Gibbons
M.A. at Columbia University in the philosophical foundations of physics
Christopher Holmes
Master’s in history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, England, then physics graduate school
Kristen Shapiro
Working in the Astronomy Department at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands for a year, then astrophysics graduate school
Megan VanDyke
Moving to Australia