You can’t tell from the photo, but the tone is lovely.
Both Physics and Astronomy courses do a lot of work with waves, and while light is one of the most important types for study, sound is exceptionally handy for demonstrations. There’s an immediacy, a feel, that can make sonic demos feel more intuitive.
We have a few of these about, metal bars with supports at the nodes of a standing wave, seated over a wooden box. The string goes where the bar doesn’t vibrate, and hence doesn’t dampen the sound, while the box helps it resonate louder. Ka-bong! They’re quite fun.
Quality!
And, yes, Carl J. Ulrich of Minneapolis, Minnesota did some fine work here.
As one might imagine, hundreds of students in labs each semester means we use a lot of batteries. Just a ton of ’em.
Sometimes we need them at full capacity, but certain uses can be fine if they’ve started to develop some of that internal resistance after a while. Certain situations call for the higher potential current output of alkalines, while others need lithiums to keep the voltage from dropping too low. And at other times, the relative calm of a zinc-carbon battery is just perfect, like when students are building basic circuits and there’s a risk of shorting the batteries.
Much lower risk of booms and burns with the zinc-carbon.
Still, unless a battery’s in real rough shape, you never know how much juice they’ve got left just by looking. Pop one on the tester to see. When they’re almost new, you can hear the needle tap the far side!
In 1991, the Astronomy Club had clearly grown tired of plain walls at the Observatory. With a fantastic mural adorning the interior stairwell to access the Clark telescope (subjects of future posts!), the regular hallways must have looked… fine.
Prof. Dave Lien was the faculty member overseeing all of this, and in April the club had decided a scale version of the solar system would look pretty great. Time to check in with the Art folks!
(Also: “Observing, etc.”)
Just a few-AU-long stretch.
And you know what? It’s way better than white walls! The final design ended up being different from the proposed idea, though the concept is the same. The Sun occupies a place of prominence, and the mural includes both scaled sizes and scaled distances of our solar system, shown side by side.
Not both at once: in that case, it either wouldn’t fit in the building or the planets would be so tiny you couldn’t see them. Both of which really defeat the purpose. (Not that they aren’t fun demonstrations in their own right!)
January, 1997.
Five and a half years later, ta-da! After a quarter-century, several building repaintings and a recent renovation, it still looks sharp.
FOR RELEASE: February 1, 1971; FOR KEEPSIES: In Perpetuity
Do you ever set aside some papers, because you don’t need them right now, but they were maybe interesting for later? And then eventually there’s just a pile or folder or shelf devoted to these, because you’ve inadvertently started a collection? And then, half a century later, someone stumbles across these boxes and wonders, why?
Why do we have boxes of printed press releases from NASA in the early 1970s? Probably the same reason we have old math exams from the 1940s out at the Observatory. (That’s a post for another time!)
Honestly, if we’d been diligent about tidying this stuff, this blog would be way less interesting.
Once upon a time – for a good long while, in fact – mathematics and astronomy overlapped. Now, of course, astronomy is considered more appropriately physics-adjacent, and mathematics would like to make it clear that while they share a department with statistics, the two really are their own, distinct fields.
Then there’s the fuzzy boundary zone between biophysics and applied mathematics and mechanical engineering…
This was a quality instrument, we’re supposing. Currently it’s a steel door, with its associated cabinet, apparatus, and everything else unaccounted for and presumed long gone. Any details associated with it have disappeared as well.
But check out that sticker! The Nuclear-Chicago Corporation made a variety of devices for nuclear radiation detection, although a cursory internet search reveals mostly hand-held items rather than cabinet-mounted equipment. Still, have a look through that fantastic mid-century aesthetic! Back in the days when uranium prospecting was what all the cool kids were doing.
They put out the model 2586 “Cutie Pie” in 1954. The Cutie Pie.
At any rate, Abbott Laboratories bought them out in 1964, so whatever device this accompanied goes back to sometime between 1954 – the name change to Nuclear-Chicago – and the 1964 sale. Should we ever stumble across the remains of it, rest assured we’ll make note of it.
In our attempts to minimize the ever-growing aura of light pollution around the Observatory, we work to form good relationships with our neighbors. And to maintain them.
Back in 1979 – an excellent vintage! – the Keystone Water Company agreed to a switch controlling the light outside their standpipes, just south of the Observatory. For as long as we remain good stewards of the switch, always turning it back on when we’re done observing, they let us adjust the night sky’s brightness just a little bit more each night.
Your average TA for an Astronomy night lab is excited about their job. They not only took an Astronomy course, but liked it enough to come back. At night. Irregularly, as the weather permits, sometimes in the cold of a Pennsylvania winter. They’re enthusiastic about their job. We’re enthusiastic about them.
Good question!
So when you find notes from almost three decades ago with student gripes? Totally understand. We wish every student could bring the same excitement to a night with telescopes and stars.
And, for the record: Saturn absolutely is beautiful through a telescope on a night with no moon. Just phenomenal.
Some years ago, back in 1887, the University received a lovely Clark & Sons refracting telescope, complete with a clock drive to track the stars against the Earth’s rotation. When a shiny new toy scientific apparatus arrives on your doorstep, it’s very important to confirm that it works as intended. Here, in an old notebook, we see the original data on the clock drive’s variance from the ideal sidereal tracking rate.
It pays to be thorough.
“Observations for Determining Sidereal Clock’s Rate Nov. 8, 1889”
Then follows a table of stars with known right ascension and declination, then a repeated set of measurements 20 days later. “Rate of Loss per day .268 sec.” Considering the frequency with which proper polar alignment and tracking proves a nuisance more than a century later, that seems pretty good. The clock drive is long gone, of course, so we can only guess at how accurate it was and stayed throughout the decades.
It looks like these entries were by a J. D. Minick, Class of ’88. Best guess is a John David Minick, graduate of Bucknell in 1888, listed as Prof. John D. Minick of Lenoir, N.C. in the Memorials of Bucknell University, 1846 – 1896. Astronomer, apparently. Mathematician? Physicist? At this point, we’re content with the mystery.
Around the same time, Bucknell was also the home of one Jacob Henry Minick, Class of 1891. He’s listed in the link above as from Orrstown, PA, in Franklin County. Any relation?
“The Jacob H. Minick Fund was established by a bequest from Jacob H. Minick, Class of 1891, the income of which is to be given each year to students who, because of some physical difficulty, are forced to use crutches during all of their college work.”
