The Undergraduate Research Symposium was today, and there were so many interesting talks available that we couldn't go to all of them, but we did get to go to a couple. We heard a talk from a student who has been working with Professor Ninkov; he's developing and testing a quantum dot film, which would cover a CCD. The film takes in the light from a source (i.e. the sun) and fluoresces lower energy light into the camera, this means that sources with shorter wavelengths can be observed using CCDs with quantum dot films across them, as the decrease in energy results in longer wavelengths, which fall in the band that CCDs detect most efficiently. We also got to go see Lee's talk, which was about polarization in astronomy and the array he and Dmitry have been testing, which they'll be bringing up to Oregon to observe the solar eclipse on the 21st.
Unfortunately, the bulb in our light source blew out today, and we had to find a replacement, which Matt was able to locate for us. The new bulb worked at first, for a few minutes, while I was homing and calibrating the stages, but I didn't realize it had gone out when I was trying to find and focus the beam of light with the camera, so it took a while before I figured out that there wasn't any light to focus (oops). On Monday we're going to have to switch back to the original light source we were using before Peter and Ashley borrowed it for their setup.
No comments:
Post a Comment