Posts in category outreach

Meeting Update 07-17-2014

Visualizations

  • Transferring files from Bluestreak to grassdata as we get them.
  • Some of the more recent .bov files have been corrupted. Moving the chombos for those to my scratch space so we can do post processing again. Here is what we have so far:

​GIF ​GIF

​GIF ​GIF

Outreach

  • PREP Visit: I was invited by PREP (Pre-College Experience in Physics for Girls) to have lunch with the students, and come give a talk on what I had been working on this summer. Titled the talk, "Your Computer: The unexpected frontier in star formation." Covered what we do know about star formation, how colliding flows, and AstroBEAR contributes to the field. We derived the Jeans mass as done in Derek Ward-Thompson's book (i.e. it was not intimidating, just some variable manipulation), and gave them a problem where they can just plug in some numbers and determine whether a proto-star will collapse to a star. I promised them brownies if I got 10 answers by Friday this week. Showed them some simulations Erica and I had done, how we use computers to run code. They seemed most blown away by terminal and that your computer doesn't need to just be used for writing essays for AP English and using Facebook. A lot of good questions, very smart students. Someone from the group should visit them every year.
  • Horizons: Erica and I shared the lesson last week (Thursday, July 10th). We had 5 students: one kindergartener, one in third grade, and three who were in middle school. Erica tells me that we only had three this past Tuesday. Today I am hosting the session in collaboration with some graduate students in Optics. We're going to talk about the Sun and telescopes. Hoping if the weather permits (sadly it is expected to be partly cloudy around that time) we'll use a sun-scope and check out some sunspots. Optics is bring some pinhole cameras and telescope demos as they get a lot of this stuff via donation from Edmund Optics.