Week four of my internship is going great! For this week I continued my work with Nat and her MEMS mirror project. We did our usual routine of testing but something did happen in between. We found that after heating and cooling the mirror several times in a row, the laser would drift off camera. To explain, we would turn on the heat lamp and face it towards the mirror, but as we did the laser reflecting on the mirror and onto the CCD camera would drift off screen. This was due to thermal gradient that causes uneven heating, which then also causes thermal stress. Since we were only heating up one side of the mirror more than the other there was a thermal gradient happening. After the mirror gets heated up enough on one side, it tends to tilt towards the heat, creating a thermal stress on the mirror. Because there is nothing we could do to prevent this from happening, and after hearing the opinions of several other affiliates, we decided to ignore this for right now as it would be a major set back to our testing.
Me switching between channel V0 and V1 on a circuit board to see what voltage is being put out.
This week, we also finished all the testing we needed for Nat’s MEMS project. My plan now is to start working on the telescope attachment. On Thursday, I had the chance to go to the Sommers-Bausch Observatory and see the telescope I would be working on. The observatory was built in 1952, but the Boller and Chivens telescope was installed in 1973. This telescope also uses a CCD camera to do astroimaging and photometry. The reason for the visit was to test the compatibility of the CCD camera I was using in Nat’s project, with the telescope. I also saw a couple of other telescopes in the observing deck, they are called Artemis (east) and Apollo (west). These telescopes are PlaneWave telescopes and are also used for observing the night sky.
24-inch Boller and Chivens Telescope at the Sommers-Bausch Observatory.
On the weekend, I went to an Eslabon Armado concert in Denver. I went with my sister and her friend and had lots of fun. This band is made up of three Latin teens who make music in the Latin pop genre. But to actually sum up the music that they make, its mainly songs about heartbreaks.
Not the best view of the concert but still closer than what other people had.
This upcoming week will be my last week at LASP and because of that, Dmitry has decided to give me a small project to work on by myself that involves working in Solidworks. I will go into more details next week!
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