Hi again, this is Cutler summing up my last week in Boulder before I left a few days ago! I came to Boulder to work with LASP(The laboratory of atmospheric and space physics) in Boulder, Colorado. There were many unexpected turns throughout the internship but it proved to be more than worth it in the end!
The last week consisted of two nights of observing through the 24-inch telescope at the Sommers-Bausch Observatory. The first night was last night Sunday night, right after I posted my last blog. Rose(the manager of the observatory) needed help calibrating the telescope to make it more accurate when we tell it to point to certain objects in the night sky. So, of course, I offered to help her with that and it was absolutely worth it! We started out by focusing on the telescope and telling it to point at a star in the night sky. We then used a website online to look at that a photo of what the telescope pointed at and tell us the exact degrees and arcminutes that the telescope was off by. Then with this data, the program that runs the telescope can start a 5-hour process that takes photos all over the night sky so it can be sure that the telescope is fully calibrated and will point to where it actually needs to. This process is almost entirely automated except for the fact that the observatory dome doesn’t rotate by itself because it was built in the 1950s and operates on a railroad track since then. So, this program would run and turn the telescope to take photos throughout the night sky, but Rose and I had to watch it the entire night to move the dome to where the telescope needed to take photos of. This process took about 5 hours and it was about 1:30 in the morning when we finished. Afterward, we went out to another observatory deck where the entire roof folded on itself to reveal the night sky. We then used a smaller telescope to look at some of the planets in the night sky and other star formations.
The second night of observing was really just me and another undergrad student from CU, Eluchi, trying to figure out how to set up the telescope perfectly to observe the night sky. This was the first and only night we were going to get to measure the polarity of night sky objects before I left due to a variety of complications before so. This posed as a challenge because this was the first time my mentor Dmitry
wasn’t there to help along with Rose being gone as well. Oluchi and I struggled for a few hours to make sure all of the specific conditions were met to run the telescope but eventually, Dmitry(who had his baby a few days earlier) came into the observatory for a few hours to help us set everything right. Once we figured out the perfect focus and alignment of the telescope and were ready to start observing and collecting data; too many clouds had moved into the area and we were not able to observe anything. Just like the previous week, bad weather is just part of the job. Oluchi and I still learned a lot however having to problem solve without help.
The next day, I drove home here to Ridgway and spent 8 hours dealing with the normal outflow of traffic on a Friday in Denver. It was a very sudden ending to this 6-week internship as I thought I was picking my mom up from the airport and spending a few days more in Boulder. Due to thunderstorms, she was not able to make her flight and suddenly I had to leave Boulder within 15 minutes to drive home in time to beat the monsoon that would soon spread over the western slope! Below are some photos I took with my phone throughout my last week.
Wow, awesome experience and photos!