UNTITLED

[one_half] Steve Benton Why put a telescope on a balloon? What kinds of instruments can fly? Where do balloons fly, and why is Antarctica a good choice? When…okay, I don\’t have a question for this one, but I\’ll talk about future prospects, including launches in Canada. And Who: I\’ll show off some of the balloon […]

[one_half] Dr. Tuan Do, Dunlap Fellow Accurate sky background models are necessary for realistic predictions of telescope and instrument performance. However, there are significant variations to sky background measurements as well as models. Do will describe methods and challenges of modeling the sky background for the IRIS integral-field spectrograph for TMT. The model he describes

[one_half] Dr. Suresh Sivanandam, Dunlap Fellow Many years ago, people published a result claiming that the NIR sky background was factors of 2-3 lower at the South Pole when compared to a mid-latitude astronomical site. This meant that something physically different was going on in the upper atmosphere above the Pole. Sivanandam and team members

[one_half] Anish Roshi, National Radio Astronomy Observatory The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is the world’s premiere single-dish radio telescope operating at metre to millimetre wavelengths. Its enormous 100-metre-diameter collecting area, unblocked aperture and excellent surface accuracy provide unprecedented sensitivity across the telescope\’s full 0.1 – 116 GHz operating range. To keep up the discovery potential

[one_half] Prof. Keith Vanderlinde, Dunlap Institute The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is an ambitious new project designed to map the distribution of matter in the Universe, over half the sky and a broad swath of cosmic history. Leveraging recent developments from from the cell phone industry (cheap, low noise amplifiers) and the huge

[one_half] Abigail Crites, University of Chicago The South Pole Telescope is a 10-meter telescope designed to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. Abigail Crites will discuss the polarization-sensitive receiver, SPTpol, installed on the South Pole Telescope. In particular, she will discuss the transition edge sensor (TES) bolometer technology used in the camera. Abigail is

[one_half] Dr. Sarah Tuttle, University of Texas at Austin Telescopes are getting larger and with that growth comes a demand for large-scale instrumentation to take advantage of that growth. Unfortunately, that often leads to instrumentation that is scaled up from our current facilities. This moves us into a regime of heavy, large, expensive parts that

[one_half] Dr. Neil Rowlands, COM DEV Astronomy (and astronomers) have been very effective in driving detector technology developments. When I arrived at Cornell University as a graduate student in 1985, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite had just completed its short but highly productive mission surveying the infrared sky, using 62 discrete photoconductive IR detectors. The Cornell

[one_half] Dr. Suresh Sivanandam and Dr. Nicholas Law, Dunlap Fellows Sivanandam and Law described the recent installation of instrumentation at the PEARL research station on Ellesmere Island, including two wide-field cameras, a sky-brightness monitoring instrument, and a seeing-monitoring instrument. Sivanandam and Law also described recently submitted NSERC Research Tools and Instrument (RTI) grant proposals for

[one_half] Dr. David Law, Dunlap Fellow Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO, or MaNGA, is an optical IFU survey of 10,000 nearby galaxies that will take place starting in 2014 as part of the 4th installment of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Law, a Dunlap Fellow since 2011, will discuss some of the technical hurdles presented