Cornell's Department of Astronomy has dedicated a new computation and visualization laboratory designed specifically to teach astronomical analytical techniques to undergraduates. The Hewitt Laboratory is a first for Cornell and further enhances the university's top-rated astronomy program.
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| Stephen Eikenberry, right, assistant professor of astronomy, presents Ed Hewitt '54, B.M.E. '55, with his own lab account and password during the Hewitt Laboratory dedication Sept. 15 in the Space Sciences Building. The high-tech laboratory was funded through a gift from Hewitt. Robert Barker/University Photography |
The high-speed, high-tech laboratory, which is on the fourth floor of the Space Science Building, was funded through a gift from Cornell alumnus Ed Hewitt '54, B.M.E. '55, and officially dedicated Sept. 15. The gift covers the cost of the laboratory and its computers as well as maintenance and support for five years.
"We're excited by the opportunities the Hewitt lab will give our students and grateful to Ed for his generosity and farsightedness," said Joseph Veverka, professor of astronomy and chair of the department.
Because of the new lab, said Stephen Eikenberry, assistant professor of astronomy, the department will be able to teach sophomores such advanced analytical techniques as measuring the temperature of a star, locating the position in the universe of a micro-quasar or determining the astrophysics in a star-forming region. Eikenberry, who helped design and configure the facility, will inaugurate the lab next spring with Astronomy 234, Modern Astrophysical Techniques. The lab also will be open to faculty researchers and will be used to create display posters and animation.
Said Eikenberry: "While the department has always offered training in such research techniques as image and signal processing and numerical simulation, in the past the students have been taught ad hoc or one-on-one as part of independent studies. This is the first time we will be able to teach these techniques to undergraduates as part of an organized course in a coherent environment."
Hewitt Lab, Eikenberry said, will leave students better prepared to work on original research projects with astronomy professors and to qualify for more of the highly competitive summer research assistantships in astronomy around the country. A need for such a training lab acquired more urgency when Cornell established its first undergraduate major in astronomy recently.
The lab is outfitted with 16 PCs -- each named for a different bright star -- with Pentium-III chips, 21-inch monitors, up to 256 megabytes of memory and close to 1 terabyte (1,000 megabytes) of total disk space. The high-powered machines use the Linux operating system provided by Red Hat software. Eikenberry and the students will write their own data-analysis software.
For the course, Eikenberry will make available to the students some of his own research data, collected at such centers as Palomar Observatory and Arecibo Observatory. Students also will be able to access, through a high-speed connection to the World Wide Web, information from a range of online celestial databases such as 2MASS, the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey at the University of Massachusetts, and NASA's InfraRed Science Archive.
"Telescope observing is just the beginning of the process," Eikenberry explained. "Our objective is to mine the data we have for scientific information. The lab will allow undergrads to carry this work out, and the course will teach them how to do so."
The students will learn how to analyze data in infrared, optical, spectral, radio and X-ray emissions and apply it to a wide range of astrophysical and planetary astronomy research in the lab.
"What this facility is trying to do is give these young people some of the good stuff at the very earliest opportunity," said Hewitt at the lab dedication ceremony. "The world needs another Carl Sagan." Hewitt first met the late Cornell astronomy professor and popularizer of science in the 1980s.
A longtime supporter of science education at Cornell, Hewitt was a nuclear engineer and designer of reactors for submarines and power plants and ran his own consulting business before he retired in the early 1990s.
Eikenberry, who said he was inspired to become an astronomer after watching Sagan's "Cosmos" in the seventh grade, presented Hewitt with his own lab account and password, which will allow him to log in from his home in Avon, Conn. "I know you're a hacker and would have tried to break in anyway," Eikenberry joked.
The dedication was part of a two-day Friends of Astronomy symposium in which a group of about 50 interested alumni and friends took part in a hands-on demonstration of the new lab and heard about the latest developments in space science research at Cornell from members of the astronomy faculty.
Participants in the dedication included Veverka; Yervant Terzian, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and former chair of the astronomy department; Martha Haynes, professor of astronomy and director of undergraduate studies in the department; and John Ford, dean of students.
Haynes told the group that the lab will help teach undergraduates how to interpret celestial images and begin to look for answers to age-old questions on the formation and structure of the universe. "We will reach more students and earlier, and we will see more undergraduates doing professional research as a result of this facility," she said. "We think that when our Cornell students write that they have had a class like this, they will be in demand everywhere."
Ford noted, "Whenever we hear of the scientific successes of members of the astronomy department, there always seem to be undergraduates involved, and not just astronomy majors but students from all parts of campus." He also praised the department for its "sky's the limit" approach to teaching and research and thanked Hewitt for "lifting the clouds up another notch."
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