ASTRONOMY DEPARTMENT AND THE HOPKINS OBSERVATORY

Faculty of the Astronomy Department included Jay M. Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy, Chair, and Director of the Hopkins Observatory; Karen B. Kwitter, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Astronomy; and Steven P. Souza, Instructor in Astronomy and Observatory Supervisor. Bryce A. Babcock, Staff Physicist and Coordinator of Science Facilities, closely collaborated.

One set of observations was obtained as part of a major collaboration of Williams College and MIT astronomers to study Pluto and other objects in the outer solar system. The Williams-MIT teams are integrated through joint expeditions, regular telephone conferences, coordinated planning, and a major NASA grant that was used to purchase six Andor iXon CCD electronic cameras, three for each institution. Each camera system, which also includes GPS timekeeping and a related computer, is known as POETS, for Portable Occultation, Eclipse, and Transit System. A paper about the equipment, with Souza as lead author and the other Williams and MIT faculty as coauthors, appeared in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The Williams expeditionary work on this project is supported by a grant from NASA’s Planetary Astronomy.

The cameras were deployed in June 2006 at an occultation by Pluto of a 16th-magnitude star, with the Williams-MIT teams taking up five sites in Australia and New Zealand. A joint paper about this event from the Williams and MIT teams has been published in the Astronomical Journal. During the period of this report, the occultation of a star (visual magnitude 15, making it 10,000 fainter than the faintest stars visible with the unaided eye, and red magnitude 14) by Pluto was observed by Souza and Adam McKay ’08 with the 2.4-m Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico and by Babcock with one of the 8.4-m component mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Arizona, with MIT colleagues at the 6.5-m MMT in Arizona. As of this writing, the occultation was announced on an International Astronomical Union Circular and a scientific paper is in preparation.

Senior Megan Bruck ’07 was a Class of 1960 Scholar in Astrophysics. Megan continued work with Pasachoff on the fine structure of the solar chromosphere, supported by a Guest Investigator Grant from NASA. As part of her senior thesis, Bruck worked to arrange the cluster computing needed to study the 2006 data run, in which she participated, including a cluster at Williams and a cluster at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for use with the Hinode spacecraft with the goal of using Multi-Object Multi-Frame Blind Deconvolution (http://www.momfbd.org/). The observations included ground-based studies from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain, in which Bruck and Anne Jaskot ’08 participated in July 2006. Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium Summer Fellow Rangga Budoyo from Swarthmore participated in the study of the chromospheric data. Bruck continued work of Kamen Kozarev ’04 and Owen Westbrook ’06. The observations were taken in conjunction with simultaneous observations of the same features in the ultraviolet from NASA’s Transition Region and Coronal Explorer spacecraft, resulting from Pasachoff’s ongoing collaborations with Leon Golub, Ed DeLuca, and Jonathan Cirtain of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. Pasachoff and Bruck presented a poster covering in part the work from the Swedish Solar Telescope and TRACE at the May 2007 meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, HI.

Bruck’s senior thesis under Pasachoff’s supervision also included study of data from two experiments at the 29 March 2006 total solar eclipse, which was observed by a Williams College team from Kastellorizo, Greece. The first of the experiments elaborated on prior observations of rapid oscillations with approximately a 1-second period in loops in the solar corona, as part of an investigation of how the solar corona gets to reach temperatures in the millions of degrees. Observations were carried out simultaneously in the coronal red-line and the coronal green-line, both the result of the extremely high ionization caused by the corona’s extremely high temperature. The second experiment used a Fabry-Perot extremely narrow-band filter for Doppler observations of the coronal green line. The filter was borrowed from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the lab’s David Rust and Matthew Nobel had operated it on site along with Bruck and Rob Wittenmyer ’98. Pasachoff worked with Voyto Rusin, Metod Saniga, and Miloslav Druckmüller on a paper about high-resolution imaging of the corona at the 2006 eclipse; the paper is being published in the Astrophysical Journal. The image processing has brought out features smaller than those previously seen in the corona.

Pasachoff continued his work on transits of Mercury and Venus. Along with astronomy-major Suranjit Tilakawardane ’07 and Glenn Schneider of the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona, he observed the November 2006 transit of Mercury from the Mees Solar Observatory of the University of Hawaii at the 10,200-foot top of Haleakala, Maui. He also continued study of the total solar irradiance, jointly with Schneider and Richard Willson of Columbia University, Principle Investigator of NASA’s ACRIMSAT satellite. Though Pasachoff, Schneider, and Willson had readily observed the 0.1% dip in the sun’s total irradiance from Venus’s silhouette, Mercury’s apparent area is only 1/30 that of Venus, making the chances of detection marginal. Babcock took two of the POETS to the Sacramento Peak Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, to work with Kevin Reardon ’92 on other observations of the transit of Mercury.

Pasachoff continued his work with art-historian Roberta J. M. Olson of the New-York Historical Society. For the journal Religion and the Arts, they prepared a paper about an oil painting by Cosmas Damian Asam from approximately 1733 in a church in Weltenburg, Germany, that apparently shows the solar corona during a total solar eclipse. They discussed possible eclipses in that region of the world that he could have seen, and placed him in the art-historical context. Pasachoff visited the painting on site in Bavaria, as well as another Asam site in Kladruby, Czech Republic, in August 2006.

Pasachoff continued his work as President of the International Astronomical Union’s Commission on Education and Development (http://www.astronomyeducation.org). He supervised and supported the 10 Program Groups on various aspects of the Commission’s Work, and attended the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union held in Prague, Czech Republic, during August 15-25, 2006, at which he became past-president. At that meeting, he and Rosa Maria Ros of the University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, had arranged special session on Innovation in Teaching/Learning Astronomy. A book based on the proceedings, edited by Jay Pasachoff, Naomi Pasachoff, and Rosa M. Ros of the University of Barcelona, is in press at Cambridge University Press.

Pasachoff continued his work as Chair of the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group on Solar Eclipses (http://www.eclipses.info/) and also as head of a related Program Group of the Commission on Education and Development. Pasachoff continued with the advisory group of the Meade telescope company known as Meade4m. He contributes an approximately monthly blog on some astronomical subject, with recent subjects so far including the transit of Mercury, the American Astronomical Society January 2007 meeting in Seattle, a visit to the renovated Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and the American Astronomical Society May meeting in Honolulu. See http://www.meade4m.com/.

In spring 2006, Pasachoff taught Solar Physics (ASTR 412T) as a tutorial. Pasachoff used the second year of a grant for Education and Public Outreach from NASA to continue a yearly series of teachers’ workshops for public-school teachers from Berkshire County. In collaboration with Shawn Burdick of Mt. Greylock Regional High School, and assisted at the time of the workshop by Linda Wagner, Madeline Kennedy, and Barbara Swanson, the first two-day workshop took place in February 2007 for 20 teachers and it was repeated three weeks later to accommodate the oversubscription. The Education and Public Outreach NASA grant funding the workshops is grounded in Pasachoff’s research grant from NASA for studies of Pluto and other objects in the outer solar system. The workshop was largely held in the planetarium, with the Zeiss Skymaster 2KP 3/B projector and the Ansible MicroDome digital projector; it also made use of new facilities in the Paresky Student Center.

Pasachoff continues as astronomy consultant for the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology and its yearbooks, and on the Physical Science Board of World Book. 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, and as advisor to the children’s magazine Odyssey.

Pasachoff traveled to Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai over spring break, March 2007, in order to lecture and to reconnoitre in advance of the 22 July 2009 total solar eclipse that he and his team expect to observe from a site south of Shanghai. He traveled to Shanghai with Yihua Yan of the Beijing National Astronomical Observatory and Jin Zhu, the Director of the Beijing Planetarium. En route to Hong Kong, he observed the 19 March 2007 partial solar eclipse. His trip to Hong Kong was sponsored by the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Space Museum.

During August 2006, en route to the International Astronomical Union General Assembly, Jay and Naomi Pasachoff joined frequent Visiting Professor of Astronomy Marek Demianski, whose permanent institution is the University of Warsaw, in a tour of Copernicus sites in Poland. They visited Warsaw, Torun (where Copernicus was born), Frombork (where Copernicus did his major work and where he died), and Krakow (where Copernicus attended the Jagellonian University, the group visiting its Collegium Maius, which dates from AD 1400). Later, en route to the eclipse painting at Weltenburg, the Pasachoffs visited the Kepler museum in Regensburg, Germany, in the house where Kepler died.

Karen Kwitter continues her research on nebulae ejected by dying stars (“planetary nebulae”), amassing chemical compositions for a large sample in order to understand the pattern of chemical abundances produced during the evolution of their progenitor stars. She has most recently been working with long-time collaborators Dick Henry (U. Oklahoma) and Reggie Dufour (Rice U.) on Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope observations of planetary nebulae. This year Kwitter and Henry began a new collaboration with Bruce Balick (U. Washington) to investigate chemical abundances in planetary nebulae formed in low-metallicity environments such as the Galactic halo and anti-center and the halo of the Andromeda Galaxy. This large project also includes collaborators at Kitt Peak National Observatory and several European astronomy centers. As part of this work, Kwitter traveled to Cloudcroft, NM, to observe with the 3.6-meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in November 2006, and also observed at APO remotely from her office in Williamstown in January and April 2007.

Kwitter will work this summer with thesis student Anne Jaskot ’08, Jesse Levitt ’08, and Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium Summer Fellow Clifford Harvey (Worcester Polytechnic Institute ’09). Anne Jaskot ‘08 worked with Arsen Hajian on planetary nebulae images and spectra at the US Naval Observatory in the summer of 2006. Jaskot is a coauthor on the resulting paper entitled “An Atlas of [N II] and [O III] Images and Spectra of Planetary Nebulae,” that appeared in the April 2007 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, vol. 169, p. 289.

Kwitter chaired the search committee for the new director of Kitt Peak National Observatory whose efforts came to a successful conclusion with the announcement of a new appointment in April 2007. She continues as a member of the Observatories Council, an advisory group to AURA, the organization that runs the national observatories on behalf of the NSF.

Souza conducts the department’s observing program, trains observing TAs, and conducts all daytime observing. He has begun a complete reevaluation and revision of labs in the introductory courses. He hosted numerous observatory visitors, including planetarium groups, alumni, visiting classes from local schools, family days attendees, student previews and prospectives, and photo shoots. During the summer of 2006 he obtained Kresge funding for a new CCD camera for the observatory. The new camera was installed on the 0.6-m telescope in August 2006, and has dramatically improved student imaging results.

Souza continues to act as liaison between Astronomy and Facilities, on issues including campus lighting and safety. A new membrane roof was installed on the exterior observatory areas, and drainage was improved. He also acts as liaison with OIT. In May 2006 he obtained funding for a new server to provide disk space, backups, and software distribution for the department. The components have been purchased, and he is in the process of configuring the new server. Souza again upgraded the department’s instructional/summer research workstations by obtaining newer “trickle” Mac computers and LCD monitors from the Computer Science department. He developed a Mac-based display of recent images from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website for the TPL first floor display case.

Megan A. Bruck (astrophysics)	Summer astronomy research at University of Arizona
Suranjit Tilakawardane (astronomy)	Consulting firm in Boston

ASTRONOMY DEPARTMENT AND THE HOPKINS OBSERVATORY

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