Saturday, 25 April 2009

Fan Mountain Public Night

Filed under: Astronomy — Tags: , — George Privon @ 11:11

Last night was the Fan Mountain Observatory Public Night. It started out with some clouds on the horizon, which made target selection difficult. However, about halfway through the night, the clouds cleared out and we were treated with a gorgeous view of the sky. All told, we had about 350 visitors!

I spent half the night talking about the Fan Mountain Observatory Bench Optical Spectrograph (FOBOS), which is the workhorse instrument of the 40″ telescope at Fan Mountain. Most of the talk was explaining what a spectrograph is and how astronomers use them to determine the composition and line-of-sight motion of stars. There was one every 20 minutes or so, so we kept pretty busy. And it’s always nice to see people excited about science.

Both the 40″ and 31″ telescopes had eyepieces on them, giving people and opportunity to look through a large telescope! The view through them is always gorgeous. The Charlottesville Astronomical Society was also on hand with many more telescopes, looking at a variety of objects.

My grandparents were up for the public night and had a good time looking through the variety of telescopes. It was great to see them, even if it was only for a short while.

Monday, 27 October 2008

18th Century Astronomer

Filed under: School,West Virginia — Tags: , , , , — George Privon @ 18:06

… only sorta I guess.

But, I am without computer at home for the near future. On Thursday of last week I shipped my laptop back to HP for them to deal with a hard drive issue I’ve been having since the summer. The disk will shut off while I’m using the laptop, causing it to lock up (and sometimes lose data!). No biggie.. At least I have my desktop at home, right?

Wrong.

Friday afternoon, it seems my monitor no longer works. I assume the actual computer works fine, but without a monitor, what’s the point?

It is a bit of a change to be cut off from the internet like this (although not necessarily a bad one). I do miss my music, which is all stored on my computer. But, fortunately I still have my workstation here in the office (where I’m comfortably typing this).

I have been doing some fun/interesting things lately though. This past Friday was the Fan Mountain Public Night. Sadly, it was quite overcast (and a little rainy!), so we were unable to use the telescopes. A few people showed up, and we gave them tours of the telescopes and showed them the instruments used to carry out research here at UVa.

Saturday was a bit more relaxed of a day.. bit of walking in downtown Charlottesville, and watching the Penn St football game. Yesterday, I took my weekend visitors out to Green Bank, WV to visit the NRAO site. Aleya had discovered they were holding an open house, so we went to show her and her brother some stuff about radio astronomy. It was quite a cool experience, marking my second time to Green Bank in a little over two weeks (pictures coming as soon as I have a working monitor ;) ). Yesterday’s trip had a cool highlight.. standing under the Green Bank Telescope as it slewed to a new astronomical target. It was quite impressive to see the world’s largest fully steerable telescope moving.

The visit to NRAO was capped off with the raffle, where Aleya’s brother won a 6″ Dobsonian Reflector telescope!

Now that it’s back to work, I’ve spent quite a few of the last 24 hours grading tests for an introductory astronomy course. I’m 2/3 through, and should be done later this evening. Can’t wait!

Wednesday, 14 May 2008

Op-amp Circuits and Infrared 3 Color Images

Filed under: Astronomy,School,Virginia — Tags: , , , , — George Privon @ 11:23

The final lab in the Optical/IR Instrumentation class involved building several op-amp circuits to demonstrate their capabilities. We built a voltage follower, an integrating circuit, and several others. Additionally, we characterized the performance of an InSb photodiode in a vacuum/cryogen environment using a laboratory blackbody, verifying that the Planck equation worked. We also use a laser to measure the information density of a CD compared to a DVD by determining the pit spacing on each.

Finally, the most visually appealing part of the lab was the creation of a near-infrared 3 color image of the Ring Nebula (M57). We went up to Fan Mountain Observatory, used the 31″ telescope and the FanCam infrared camera to capture broadband images (J,H,K_s) of the Ring Nebula. The images were then reduced and combined into a 3-color image:

3 color Infrared image of the Ring Nebula (M57) using the 31" Telescope and FamCam at UVa's Fan Mountain Observatory.

Pictures are descriptions from all portions of the lab are available at this link: ASTR 512: Lab 5

Saturday, 26 April 2008

Fan Mountain Public Night

Filed under: Astronomy,Photography,School — Tags: , , , , , — George Privon @ 09:25


Sunset at Fan Mountain

Originally uploaded by GeorgePrivon

Last night was the semi-annual Fan Mountain Public Night held by the University of Virgina’s Astronomy Department. As you can see from this picture of sunset (with the RRRT in the foreground), it was rather cloudy. Fortunately it cleared up for a little while, enabling the 40″ and 31″ telescopes to look at Saturn and M3.

I helped guide tours of the 40″, and it was quite nice. Everyone seemed very interested in the telescopes, especially the many kids who were there.

We were planning to observe some galaxies in the near-infrared using UVa’s FanCam NIR Imager after the public night. However, it clouded back over while we were putting the camera back on the telescope and were ultimately unable to make any observations. Oh well, that’s how it goes sometimes! We’ll try again next week…

Sunday, 20 April 2008

Watching Parix-Roubaix Carnage

Filed under: Astronomy,Cycling,Virginia — Tags: , , , , , — George Privon @ 14:42

I had a nice relaxing weekend here in Charlottesville. My parents were in town for my Dad’s Darden Class reunion and it was great to spend time with them. We went to the UVa Astronomy Department’s public night at McCormick Observatory on Friday and got to look through the telescopes up there. The Clark 26″ telescope was trained on Saturn. The rings were clearly visible along with 5 moons. It almost looked like a picture!

Yesterday was the Astronomy Department picnic at Fan Mountain. It was nice to relax in the sun and enjoy good food and good company. Sprinkles of rain starting coming towards the end so it was good timing.

My parents headed out this morning, back to Idaho. So now it’s back to work for me. There’s two weeks of classes left, then finals, and then summer! I’m anxious to finish classes so I can get back to doing research. With the workload now, research has all but ceased. I have plenty of research related work, but it’ll have to wait for summer unfortunately.

As far as school goes, I have a few major projects left before the end of the semester, and one more problem set. By this Wednesday my model atmosphere of an 8 solar mass star should be completed. This model includes ionization of hydrogen and helium atoms in the atmosphere of the star, as well as doing simple radiative transfer. The code is quite involved, but very instructive.

The other project (which hasn’t been well defined yet) is for the Optical/IR Instrumentation class. It will likely involve putting together and testing a single-pixel detector. Also quite involved, but should be quite interesting!

Right now, I’m taking my final break before starting to work again… the 2008 Paris-Roubaix bike race is on TV, and I’m watching the carnage. The cobblestones are taking their toll and there’s been lots of crashes so far. Quite an intense race. Unfortunately it’s tape-delayed at least a week, so I already know the results. But, should be exciting to watch the action anyways!

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