Today the Night Sky Class took a solar spectrum using the SBIG SGS spectroscope. Mercury emission lines from a florescence lamp provided the calibration. Here is our calibrated image.
We had an imaging session on May 14th and captured a favorite galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy M51 in Canes Venatici. M51 is estimated to be about 23 million light years away from us. The image was take with a 12 inch LX200 Meade telescope and a SBIG ST10 CCD camera with 3×3 binning and 30 s exposure.
This is the inside of the vacuum chamber. The dislodged target is hard to see but is on the ring (with angle marks) sort of behind things in the lower right.
This is Graham Peaslee making sure that the set of targets that have been dislodged from the target mechanism are not going to jam the remote target manipulator.
Summer research in the Physics Department has gotten off to a great start. Students in Steve Remillard’s group and Paul DeYoung/Graham Peaslee’s group started this week. Other students will start next week and in the following weeks.
Jenny Hampton walked around the department this afternoon and took a few pictures of what students were doing.
Also arriving this week was the new Departmental ping-pong table which has already been put to use during lunch-time matches outside the General Physics Lab.
