Letter from the Chair
As I prepared to write this fall newsletter, I imagined discussing my continuing joy at the return of the school year, the many exciting successes of our students and staff, and the projects we have coming up this year. Instead, my plans took a sad turn, at hearing of the loss of one of the founding members of our department, Prof. Paul Hodge.
The UW Department of Astronomy was officially established in 1965 (although the history of Astronomy at UW goes back to the 1890’s), when Paul Hodge and George Wallerstein joined long-term UW faculty member Theodor Jacobsen to create an independent department with its own Ph.D. degree.
Culture comes from people, and when you found a department with people who combine brilliance with decency, you establish a culture that reflects those traits. Throughout his career, Paul embodied values I treasure about UW Astronomy, in large part because he imprinted those values himself. He was a broad thinker, with interests that spanned from the geology of impact craters on Earth to the formation of galaxies. He was a deeply committed mentor of students, known for his patience and guidance when students struggled, and his sincere pleasure when they succeeded. Paul was also someone who shared his deep knowledge generously and widely. Although he was not a “showy” personality, he wrote prolifically throughout his life, covering such diverse topics as undergraduate textbooks, hiking guides, galaxy atlases, and popular science books. He also devoted 20 years to stewardship of the Astronomical Journal. As editor, he read every single paper that passed through the journal, often offering thoughtful critiques and commentary on top of the standard referee’s report.
But more than his accomplishments — as measured by his many papers, books, and dozens of Ph.D. students and his role in founding a top-ranked astronomy department — Paul was known for being deeply, deeply kind. In the two decades I worked with Paul, I do not recall him ever saying a single word against another. He was a gentle man who always had time for other people. His face would light up when colleagues or students dropped by, delighted to hear their news, whether it was about a recent excursion to the mountains or a new scientific result. I, and all who have had the pleasure to know him, feel Paul’s loss keenly.
“It’s not unusual to see deer, elk, or even bears if you take a walk out one of the many trails nearby. There is a story on site from years ago in which a staff member left the door to the dorm kitchen open, and returned to find a bear helping itself to lunch. As you descend towards the desert the foliage changes from pine trees, to juniper to cactus to sand. The wildlife changes as well from bears to lizards and rattlesnakes along the descent. During the summer months, the monsoon is a spectacular event of nightly lightning across the white sands basin. APO provides an amazing vantage.” – Conor Sayres
Conor Sayres is a research scientist, and a graduate student who has been with the department for over 9 years. He is responsible for operations software on the 3.5m and 2.5m telescopes at APO and the SDSS APOGEE South observing system at the du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. This includes the code behind things like slewing the telescope, acquiring images, and observing and status interfaces to the various telescopes and instruments on site.
“Although I generally support the telescopes remotely, I meet weekly with the infrastructure and operations teams for each of the telescopes I work with. When I travel to the site it’s usually for instrument commissioning (I’ll be traveling down to APO to commission the Kosmos spectrograph soon, for which I wrote the control software), in which we exercise the new equipment on sky, identify/fix bugs and generally ensure that an instrument is ready for prime time. Beyond commissioning trips, I usually spend time on site each summer during ’summer shut down’, which is a long block of scheduled engineering in which we disassemble much of the telescope for routine maintenance and upgrades.” – Conor Sayres
José Sánchez-Gallego is a postdoctoral scholar who has been with the department for over 3 years. He also has a heavy hand in the work completed at APO and Las Campanas Observatory.
“While I’m responsible, along with Conor, of keeping the wheels turning at APO on all things software related, I’m also particularly involved with MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO), one of the surveys in SDSS-IV. In MaNGA we are obtaining spatially resolved spectroscopy of 10,000 galaxies, which allows us to study how gas and stars move in the galaxy, and how stars are born and die. I play different roles in MaNGA, including making sure that the data obtained each night meets our quality requirements, and writing code to optimally schedule each night of observations. I’m also the SDSS-IV plate designer. In the SDSS telescope we use optical fibres that are plugged into large, flat pieces of aluminium. Each fibre is precisely placed so that when we point the telescope to a specific point on the sky the light of stars and galaxies reaches those fibres and is directed to a spectrograph. That means that each aluminium “plate” needs to be accurately designed and drilled (in the Physics UW workshop) and then sent to APO. The science teams send me their lists of targets they want to observe and I coordinate the process of making sure that plates are drilled to those specifications.” –José Sánchez-Gallego
SDSS is a BIG collaboration. Currently the collaboration includes over 35 institutions and groups. The collaboration includes: The University of Tokyo, University of Notre Dame, New Mexico State University, New York University, the Brazilian Participation Group, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Vanderbilt University. While these institutions have initial access to the data and the direction of the projects, the SDSS data will become public. In that sense, thousands of institutions all over the world use APO data! You can find more information about APO on the New Mexico State website.
The League of Astronomers is a club at the University of Washington which seeks to connect undergraduates to the joy of astronomy. We are open to majors and non-majors alike–all are welcome. We started out Fall Quarter with RSO tabling in Red Square, where we got to chat with many new members of our campus community. Our first meetings have had a great turnout, with many new and returning members joining us for another year of astronomy activities!
During Dawg Daze 2019, our mobile planetarium took part in the HUB Crawl. This event reaches thousands of students with games, activities, and fun to kick off the school year. Our volunteers gave the UW students the experience of flying through space and learning about our cosmos. The mobile planetarium has reached over 200 elementary school students this quarter! So far we have visited Wheelock Library in Tacoma and Redmond Elementary School, and many new volunteers have joined us.
On October 18th, the LoA held our Haunted Observatory Halloween event at the Theodor Jacobsen Observatory. Having sold out and beyond on our tickets to the event, we feel it was incredibly successful. We had a wide range of attendees, including a supportive astronomy staff member, undergraduates from all across campus, and even members of our greater Seattle community! We hope to continue this event next year.
The LoA itself holds general meetings every Wednesday at 4:30pm PAB B360 (AKA the Astrolab), and our Tea Time Colloquia with Astronomy’s weekly speaker are Thursdays at 1:30pm also in PAB B360. You can keep up with our activities and meetings by checking out our Facebook page.