About a year ago, I applied to be a part of NITARP (NASA
(National Aeronautics and Space Administration) IPAC (Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center) Teacher Archival Research Program) (!). This program pairs up teams of teachers and
students with an astronomer to undertake a year-long original research
project. I applied because I fell in
love with space science when I took my first ever astronomy class at the ripe
old age of 28 (life-long learning!). At
the time, I was also deeply involved with the television program Farscape, and
studying cosmology seemed like the coolest profession in the world. As a part of this program, I went to that AAS
workshop in January (and then had Charlie two weeks later!) and will go to the
next one in 6 months. I also just spent
a week at Caltech working with my teammates on a first round of data
analysis. I will say right off the bat
that my team was pretty awesome—cool and smart teachers, along with motivated
and curious students. We spent a good
chunk of our time becoming black hole experts by being repeatedly asked to
explain blackbody radiation, the structure of black holes, differences among
different classes of black holes, and Hubble’s Law, among many other details of
the project. If you are ever interested,
then I can certainly regale you with some black hole fundamentals.
An interesting thing about the study of our universe, that
was hard for me to keep tabs of (especially when looking at data), is the fact that, since everything in the universe
is moving away from us, all data that is collected is, in essence, false
data. We may record a certain number of
photons with a specific wavelength, but that means that the wavelengths that
were actually emitted (they call them rest wavelengths), are shorter. So we detect stretched-out wavelengths, not
the actual wavelengths, and certainly not in real time, but from billions of
years ago. When your project is on
ratios between wavelength bands, this becomes tricky to tease out. It sort of boggles my mind because we are
detecting artifacts of the stretching of space and time. Once you focus on a large dataset, these big
pictures ideas fall away, though, and you are left with a matrix of wavelength
plot combinations, slopes and R-squared values.
It was exhilarating to use my brain in that way again. Every job requires you to think/act in
certain ways. Teaching uses a different set
of skills than research (obviously), and it was exciting to be back in the land
of 8 hour excel work days.
Part of our week also involved half day tours of Caltech and
JPL. I have never given much thought to
either, other than a passing understanding that intense science and math
happens at both. It was also apparent
that, as with Einstein, genius does not come without consequences. We passed by a statue of George Ellery Hale
on campus and were informed that he would periodically have to take sabbaticals
in order to regain his mental health and JPL has the legacy of Jack Parsons and
his interest in the occult (I’m currently reading Sex and Rockets!)—apparently
there was a concerted effort to delete him from JPL history (unsuccessful,
obvs.).
Here are some pics of stuff!
Natan drove down with Theo and I took Charlie on his first
flight!
Dazed and confused.
Conveniently fell asleep at take-off.
Our first day started off with a tour of Caltech:
There are only 1,000 undergrads! But the campus is huge.
The astronomy building was designed to look like the sand crawler from Star Wars.
Spanish mission style walkways.
The "gene pool": the tiles of this pool look like strands of DNA. My favorite part of the caltech campus was all of the cool science architectural flourishes!
Cool building geometry/lights.
Carbon bonds fence!
After a few days, we had a very detailed tour of JPL:
The main building, where a deer was walking on the steps!--really made me think of the film, I Am Legend.
My favorite thing at JPL--an art installation that visually depicts JPL's communications with various missions--the lights stream down the name of the mission and the relative amount of data is represented by number of lights (lots of lights = lots of data). The lights that stream up represent the relative amount of data/commands sent to the missions.
A model of the rover. The wheels imprint the Morse code for "JPL" into the Martian soil.
I really loved all of the 50's fonts on the buildings and would like to designate a space for project formulation in my own house...
A model of the surface of Mars--used for Rover testing.
Where stuff gets assembled.
Look at that huge container of liquid nitrogen! That's a lot of shattered roses.
We took two nighttime outings during the week: to the Santa Monica pier and to the Griffith Observatory.
Inside Griffith. We had to park way down the mountain and walk up. It is packed nightly.
Classic Griffith.
They love each other.
Fourth of July fireworks from our front porch.
Beach babe.
I'm now in muggy, hot Boston, where I'm roughly halfway through a funky fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It's the closest I will ever come to being a historian, and the task of working through compilations of presidential papers and original documents with the intent of putting together a story (or in my case, educational materials), is much harder than I imagined. I will have much more to say about this experience later.
Charlie and I flew to Boston together!
The comfort of Sophie makes the trauma of flying a little easier.
Part of my project involves looking at Thomas Jefferson's voluminous collections of letters (he wrote 19,000 during his lifetime). This one is a treasure--he details the ways in which he is personally taking measurements of climate change parameters! Once I find a cool one (transcriptions are much easier to read), I then embark on a mad hunt to find the original.....kind of like Nicholas Cage in National Treasure.
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