Ithaca College

Tuesday, October 30th at 12:10 in CNS 204

Joyce Wu
University of Rochester and Ithaca College
Design and Alignment of the Hilbert Telescope for use in an Undergraduate Laboratory

A Ritchey–Chrétien telescope, named in memory of Robert S. Hilbert, was designed and constructed for use in an undergraduate laboratory. It will also be valuable in demonstrating multinodal aberration in a controlled environment in which misalignment would be purposely introduced to the system to display the resulting aberration in the image. Testing of the secondary mirror concluded with positive results. Testing of the primary mirror was hindered by the incorrect assembly of the Offner Null lenses that were used to explore aberrations, but ultimately concluded with results that suggested little flaw in the accuracy of the mirror. After multiple careful assemblies of the system, methods of alignment in the lab were improved and resulted in images that were detectable by the CCD camera, though there is room for improvement before the system could be used to create controlled multinodal aberration for study. The nature of the aberrations presently produced by the system due to misalignment must be better understood before any experiments are run that would introduce any external aberration not intrinsic to the fundamental setup. 

Colleen Mahoney and Charles Woodward
Ithaca College
Archaeogeophysics in Cyprus 2012

We will be talking about the KAMBE team and the work we did in Cyprus, relating to Archaeogeophysics, and the study of Archaeological remains, using Physics concepts. We will talk briefly about the history of the KAMBE team, and then focus more on the Data that we obtained and processed this summer, as well as briefly talking about the experience of working abroad with Ithaca College.

Caleb McWhorter
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Ithaca College 
A Foam Model for Bread Development 

Here a model for the geometry of two dimensional bread is investigated. The incorporated model takes into consideration the interior structure of the gases in a bread foam. Using the calculus of variations, a minimal configuration is found with respect to the gravitational potential and surface energy of the dough. We compare the resulting configurations to previous models of bread as a liquid drop by comparing the discrete curvatures of the convex hull from the found minimal configurations. Elementary statistics are also incorporated to compare the two models.

Pizza and Refreshments will be available for $1. Please bring your own cup. Remember to Recycle, Reuse, Reduce.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact the department assistant at jackerman@ithaca.edu. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.