Astronomy Project Week 2000

The goal of this project is to give students the opportunity to experience first hand what it is like to be an observational astronomer, to observe the night sky in a location where the darkness allows much better seeing than in Chicago, and to experience the environment of professional observatories including research scientists at work.

In the contiguous United States, New Mexico and Arizona are rapidly becoming the only states where professional observatories can be found. The lack of air pollution, low humidity, high altitude and absence of light pollution make these areas ideal for astronomical observing.

Our quest for clear skies therefore takes us to New Mexico to spend eight days at the New Mexico Skies Amateur Astronomy Guest Observatory in Cloudcroft. At this observatory students will learn to successfully use a variety of astronomical equipment fo find, observe and image the Moon, planets, star clusters, galaxies and nebulae. Equipment the students will use includes Dobsonian telescopes, Newtonian and Cassegrain focus reflectors, as well as refracting telescopes. Students will take pictures of astronomical images using photographic and CCD cameras.

During the day we we have made plans to visit the National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, NM; the national Solar Observatory Telescopes in Sunspot, NM; and the Apache Point Telescope near Cloudcroft which is run by the University of Chicago. TheVery Large Array close to Socorro is the world’s premier astronomical radio telescope featured in several movies including “Contact.” The entire array of antennas is roughly one and a half times the size of Washington, DC.

Seven students from the upper school are going on this trip led by faculty members Philip Blessman and Lor Gehret.


Philip Blessman, B.A. Northwestern University, M.A. and M.S. University of Illinois. Mr. Blessman has come from St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire to The Latin School where he currently teaches astronomy and physics in the upper school. He has taught with CCD cameras, and spectrographs on both refracting and reflecting telescopes and has done special studies in galaxy formation and interaction using computer modeling to simulate galaxy collisions.
 
Lor Campbell Gehret, A.B. Smith College, M.A. Vassar College.
Ms. Gehret has been involved in the sciences as a researcher, teacher, writer, editor, speaker and technical consultant to government, industry and non-profit organizations for over 25 years. She has worked with Ameritech to bring interactive Hubble Telescope images to the Adler Planetarium museum exhibits, as an editor of radio astronomy publications at the Cal-Berkeley Space Science Laboratory, as a science analyst on the NASA Viking Lander Imagery Team, and as a researcher and editor in the astronomy department at Yale University.





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