Hello again! My name is Cutler and this is the second week of my Pinhead internship at LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics here at CU Boulder in Colorado. To quickly recap, I came to CU to work with Adriana(a fellow intern) and my mentor Dmitry! We plan on connecting a specialized RIT polarization imaging camera to measure the astronomical polarity of deep sky objects in space. This week consisted of a fellow grad student named Wes(who is waiting on parts to work on projects for NASA) and me continuing to work on assembling a 3d printer. The name of it is the Modix Big 60 Version three. Wes and I upgraded the printing heads on the printer this week which will allow us to print objects 11 times as fast with the Super Volcano Upgrade. This basically is just an upgraded version of the printing head before but with a much larger nozzle that allows for higher temperatures and thicker filament. We then started to assemble an enclosure for the 3d printer. This allows us to heat the air inside the printer to a specified temperature so the printing goes much smoother and the filament doesn’t cool down too quickly when it is printed.
This Thursday, Adriana, Wes, Dmitry, and a couple of other grad students visited the Sommers-Bausch observatory to test our camera equipment with the telescope there. This was my first time seeing the telescopes inside this observatory and they are huge! We wanted to test if the camera and other gear we will be using will work with the computers and telescope at the observatory; so we ran a few tests trying to assess how good their connectivity is with the telescope. When plugged directly into the computers that run the telescope, everything worked perfectly fine, however, when we tried connecting them to the telescope directly, there were some issues. Rose, one of the astronomers who work inside that observatory, believed it had to do with the computer needing the equipment to be within three feet of the computer through USB type three cables, which would explain why it worked when we connected it to the computer, and not to the telescope itself. This problem should absolutely be able to be fixed, and Rose said she would work on it over the weekend!!
The image of the left is a smaller, yet still, a massive telescope that is used for other projects at the observatory. The picture on the right is the telescope that I will be running, as long as all the equipment cooperates. This week I also switched apartments! I had a two-week lease with a group of 7 grad students who all loved to climb and go kayaking. Now I am staying with another group of undergrads who are interested in similar fields as me! Thanks to all who read this blog, see you next week!
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