David PesciIn the summer of 2010 Craig Malamut traveled to the Easter Islands to study and photograph a rare solar eclipse. Soon after his eclipse observations were completed, NASA used one of his photographs in their official materials on the event. He also spent a week collaborating with astronomers from the University of Chile in Santiago to study Pluto’s atmosphere as it obscured the light from a faint star. This year, Malamut has coauthored two papers for astronomical journals and is analyzing data from the Hubble Space Telescope on gas and dust clouds lying near the sun and other nearby stars.…
Olivia DrakeBill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, is the co-author of "The Highly Dynamic Behavior of the Innermost Dust and Gas in the Transition Disk Variable LRLL 31," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 732, Issue 2, article id. 83 in 2011, and "Preliminary Analysis of MOST Observations of the Trapezium," published in American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #96.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43 in 2011. Herbst and his graduate student Holly Capelo are the authors of "Optical And Infrared Monitoring Of KH 15D," published in the American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #226.08; Bulletin…
Bill HolderBill Herbst, the John Monroe van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, will serve as director of graduate studies, beginning this fall 2011 through spring 2014. Herbst received his B.A degree from Princeton University, his M. Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto and has taught at Wesleyan since 1978, often serving as chair of the Astronomy Department and as director of the Van Vleck Observatory. In 2003, he received the Wesleyan Alumni Association's Binswanger Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has recently served on the Advisory Committee, as chair of the Merit Committee, as vice-chair of RAB and, over the years, on many other faculty…
Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, received a grant for $471,990 from the National Science Foundation. The grant will provide summer research stipends for students and funds for an Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium with the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium (KNAC). KNAC is a group of consisting of Wesleyan and seven other institutions (Colgate, Haverford, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley and Williams) that have worked together to improve research experiences for undergraduate astronomy majors. KNAC was formed 20 years ago with a seed grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation and has been supported in recent years by the…
Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, and Seth Redfield, assistant professor astronomy, are co-authors of the article, "Gas Absorption in the KH 15D System: Further Evidence for Dust Settling in the Circumbinary Disk," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 711, Issue 2, pp. 1297-1305 in March 2010. Their data supports a picture of a particular circumbinary disk as being composed of a very thin particulate grain layer composed of millimeter-sized or larger objects that are settled within whatever remaining gas may be present. Herbst also is the author of "Periodic variability in the emission spectrum of…