Painstaking Pane Prints (6/25)

Yesterday morning I was more justifiably tired, as our teacher had condoned the late night. I still managed to get out of bed by 8:20 and arrive at breakfast by 8:55, which still left me plenty of time to eat before class started at 10.

The first part of class was a lecture by our co-instructor, Mr. Kron, on the astrophysicists who worked at Yerkes, but are not known for their discoveries here. I found it surprising how many famous scientists had worked at Yerkes at some point in their career throughout the years. On the other hand, it was especially saddening to hear that many of the male scientists at Yerkes had been credited for the work of their female assistants.

We were given a couple of hours to work on our projects, during which my team had to decide on how best to recover from the complications the night before. We were told that we would be able to use the 40-inch telescope to find star diameters, but when we actually had come to do so, nobody knew how we would go about taking quantitative observations. This was more than a bit disappointing, but we still had another section of our project that we could dedicate more time to: taking images of stars through different filters and analyzing differences between the resulting photographs. We had requested and received these images the evening before, so we set about using DS9, our go-to FITS file examiner, to take measurements of the flux from each image. We ran into some complications with our conversion of the pixel values to meaningful units, so we just decided to show the percentage of the total flux coming through each filter.

We broke for lunch at the college dining hall, and while the food was good, the variety of the food at Baker Hall back on campus still makes it a bit better in my opinion. My group walked back up to Yerkes and resumed work on our project until everyone had returned from lunch. This did not take long, and soon we began another activity.

Mr. Kron took us to the archives a large room surrounded by massive cabinets filled to the brim with glass plates. These plates are essentially photographs, solely black images that were used for empirically measuring different properties of celestial objects at Yerkes until just a few decades ago. According to Mr. Kron, Yerkes has over 100,000 of these, some dating back to the turn of the 19th century! He took out a few images of well-known objects to demonstrate to us what they look like. They were grainy, but that may have just been due to the now obsolete quality/resolution of the telescope and not the viewing medium.

The fun did not stop there, however. Mr. Kron went on to give us a tour of the darkroom, and then let us use the plates that he had shown us before to create prints! This was really cool, as I had been in a darkroom before, but the equipment they have at Yerkes is far superior to what I have seen in the past. He had us use a few more steps of chemical washes to make sure the photo did not continue to develop over time, and they had an amazing exposure machine that projected a perfectly even light onto the photo paper and was connected to a timer. This whole process took about an hour and a half for the five or six of us that were using the darkroom, so by the time we were done we did not have a huge amount of time left to work on our project. My group was still able to complete our presentation, though, and we felt reasonably prepared despite the challenges we had encountered.

Dinner came and went, and the RAs who joined us for the trip (Erika and Brian) kindly built a fire for us (get it, like kindling? Okay, I'll leave.) to roast marshmallows over. I was planning on swimming, but the RAs intelligently shut us down, as there was no lifeguard on duty. As it grew closer to nightfall, we once again walked up to the observatory to do more project work. My group discussed our results with Gourav and fixed any errors that we had made, then began practicing the actual speaking part. 

Almost everybody had completed their projects by then, so we all gathered in the library and watched Interstellar. The movie far exceeded my expectations for two good reasons. One, it was not a cheesy and cliché representation of the non-observable parts of our universe, and two, it had a legitimate scientific application. For some of the shots of black holes, they ran supercomputer simulations that researchers did not have the finances to perform on their own, giving us a valuable insight into how matter and space behave in extreme gravitational conditions. The one downside was that it was three hours long, so I went to bed rather late. It was another fun day at the Yerkes Observatory, and I'm sad that this had to be our last full one. Good night!