Ad Astra Arleen

Starting the year off with a cosmic perspective ✨

Happy Holidays and Winter Solstice! 🎄

Had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Holmdel Horn Antenna with my peers from ! We learned about the history of the antenna, radio astronomy, and the Cosmic Microwave Backround, or CMB, from Robert Wilson, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1978 for the discovery of the CMB with Arno Pensias.

It was an honor to interview Dr. Wilson about his life and work at the Horn Antenna. Video will be posted eventually 😅

Astronomer on duty at the 61” Kuiper Telescope on Mount Bigelow in the Catalina Mountains 🔭

The Kuiper Telescope was built in the early 1960’s to survey the Moon in preparation for the upcoming lunar spacecraft missions.

I learned how to operate this telescope and saw incredible views of Jupiter, Saturn, the Blue Snowball Nebula (NGC 7662), and different Messier objects that were too faint to capture on my phone.

Mobile Astrophotography 📱🌟

Practiced some astrophotography during Astronomy Camp where we had a Bortle 4 sky! 🌌

We measure light pollution using the Bortle Scale which ranges from 1-9, 1 being excellent dark-sky site and 9 being inner-city sky. Although I was 9,157 ft above sea-level on Mount Lemmon, we still had the glow of Tucson and it was cloudy this night. Nevertheless, on a clear night, you can easily see the faint glow of the Milky Way and hundreds of stars!

Here’s one of my best selfies ever, with a bright Jupiter and Pleiades (and lots of stars) photobombing me ✨

📸: iPhone 14 Pro Max

To get any clear picture in the night, it’s important to have a tripod because you have to take a long-exposure photo. I used the iPhone’s built in camera on night-mode, and set the exposure to 30 seconds (so if you’re in the picture, you have to hold the pose for 30 seconds!).

I used the .cos tripod from which came in so handy during my trip. It has a little remote, so you don’t have to put a timer on to take the picture.

Let me know if you want to learn more about mobile astrophotography! This is a great way to get into it for complete beginners 🤳

I want to believe 👽

📣 Excited to share the release of Elio Morillo's () memoir, "The Boy Who Reached for the Stars"! 📚 As a Latina pursuing a career in STEM, Elio's journey has been nothing short of inspiring and empowering. 🌟

Coming from a similar background, Elio's passion for space exploration and his unwavering determination to break barriers in STEM fields have shown that with hard work and dedication, we can achieve our dreams, regardless of our origins. 🔭🚀

"The Boy Who Reached for the Stars" serves as a reminder of the power of perseverance and the importance of uplifting one another in our STEM journeys. 🌍✨

I encourage you all to check out Elio's memoir – it's a testament to the potential we all have to make our mark in the world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Let's continue to support each other and reach for the stars together! 💫👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

If you know me, you know how much I love the class I’m taking at !

The semester is coming to a close soon and I wanted to share the experiments we’ve done. In this experiment, we used a circuit to determine how current affects potential, and measured it using LoggerPro.

Spring at the Planetarium 🌐🌷