Day 16
I started work today around 12:30 as we have a field trip later to the Mees Observatory that will be counted toward our hours for the day and therefore we did not need to come in for a full day of work in addition to a 4 hour field trip. Ronny and I continued experimenting with several convex lenses today in order to produce an image that could be captured with our CCD camera using a script Ronny wrote in MATLAB. We were able to produce an image of Ronny's phone (the object needed to be backlit and we didn't have anything transparent so an electronic screen worked well) with enough resolution to distinguish individual pixels. The lens we will be using for the laser experiment will be a microscope objective so that we can see much finer detail on the silicon sample after it is ablated by the femtosecond laser.
Dmitry (who recently got his PhD from RIT) organized the field trip and I was asked to help as I am one of the regular tour guides at the Mees Observatory during the summer. We left around six for our field trip and stopped at Amiel's Sub Shop for dinner. The bus we took had fabric cushioned seats and overhead storage (a lot nicer than school buses). We got to the observatory site around 8 and drove up the hill to the Gannett House where normal tours start with a presentation. I gave the presentation while Adam (another guide who is a student at U of R) set up the telescope. Once it was beginning to get dark, we walked up the hill to the observatory building. Dmitry and I showed the other interns the control room downstairs. By the time it was dark enough to start observing the sky was completely cloudy. Hopefully it was still interesting for everyone to learn about the telescope and observatory even though we didn't get to do any astronomy.
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