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 |