News Archives - GLAS Education

The Sun, the Earth, the Moon’s shadow and ‘totality’

Three people on a school stage, to the left a young man standing next to a bright, white photography light, next is a woman holding a tripod on wheels with a stick and small disc mounted on it, the third on the far right is a man leaning forward and lining his eye up with the disc and the light.

How can the Moon, which is roughly 2,000 miles across, block the light of the Sun, which is about 865,000 miles across? It depends on how you look at it. On Nov. 8, GLAS Education presented a 45-minute in-service for teachers from Rowe Elementary School, Chicago, demonstrating why we will see a solar eclipse on […]

GLAS entering its sixth year of STEM education

GLAS celebrates five years of science teaching and science fun

Cleaning up clutter for sharper cosmic images

Young woman with dark hair, wearing a dark top and blue jeans holding a laptop with a jumble of stickers on the cover, standing to the left of a screen projection entitled "Source Extraction Issues," with a series of six astronomical images showing a bright light source slowly being reduced in steps by a light reduction program.

GLAS Intern Avery Metzcar, a University of Chicago astrophysics major, spent her entire summer internship following in the footsteps of Hubble research astronomer Dr. Amanda Pagul. Her goal was to apply the same techniques used by Dr. Pagul to improve the quality of Hubble images to ones taken with the Stone Edge Observatory telescope in […]

Putting sound to the rhythm of light

Period folding is a process for tracking and graphing the light curve of a variable star. It can be a difficult concept to grasp for sighted students and researchers. For the blind and visually-impaired, it can be nearly impossible. GLAS interns Shiloh Miller, Maire Lucero and Sofiia Lauten spent this summer working on a way […]

Monitoring Geneva Lake water quality

Two young men in short pants giving a presentation and standing next to two stools on which rests a device which consists of two white hemispheres which contain electronics. In the back ground is a television screen with the words Water Quality Sensor and photograph of a bouy on blue water.

GLAS Education is experimenting with a water quality monitor anchored in eight feet of water off the shore of Williams Bay. GLAS intern Dylan Hulke and McQuown Scholar Teddy Lampert were major contributors to the project, which they explained at a GLAS presentation. Dylan did much of the electrical engineering, while Teddy focused on creating […]

Measuring photons using photographs

Five people, three young women and two young men, around a table in a large room with a television screen in the right background. Sitting to the far left is a young woman with brown hair wearing in a light-colored blouse. Behind her is standing a young woman with her brown hair pulled back. She is wearing a light red jacket over a dark purple shirt and blue jeans. Standing to her right is a young woman with dark brown hair flowing over her shoulders, wearing a black dress, her hands elevated as she talks. In the foreground are two young men facing away from the camera. A graphic is projected on the television screen.

Imagine simply scanning a photograph with an app to determine whether a light or light fixture is dark skies friendly.GLAS interns Sydney Simon and Olivia Boyd are working toward that.“We’re going to evaluate light based on color temperature, luminous flux and light angle. We’re trying to determine the dark skies friendliness of certain light fixtures […]

Music of the pulsars

GLAS Education Interns Maire Lucero and Sofiia Lauten were in need of a summer project. Given a chance to sonify pulsars, they thought, “why not?” and dived right in. “I realized I had no idea how sonification and Astronify works,” Sofiia said. “And then this was presented and I thought, ‘this is ideal.’ So yeah, […]

Interns kick off Summer 2023 at GLAS Education

Nine people, five young women and four men wearing summer clothes posing in a wooded clearing on a sunny day,

It’s June and GLAS welcomes its six summer 2023 interns. Four interns are from the University of Chicago. Two interns are high school seniors who have earned internships through their years of dedicated and steady work at GLAS. Intern projects, include Dark Skies, the LENSS night sky study, the Stone Edge Observatory’s sky survey, data […]

GLAS gets UN recognition

Kate Meredith and GLAS Education were recently recognized by the United Nations with making significant contributions to sonification research as a space science tool. Kate is also noted as a project coordinator with the Space Telescope Science Institute in developing Astronify, a software designed to sonify astronomical data. Entitled “Sonification: A Tool for Research, Outreach […]

GLAS’s Dark Skies LENSS project draws attention of PBS

Detroit PBS recently visited GLAS Education to report on GLAS’s work on in monitoring light pollution in the Geneva Lake area as part of a wider story on citizen science.On March 7, Greg King, a Detroit PBS producer, and Bennett Spencer, a freelance videographer, interviewed GLAS director Kate Meredith and talked with Adam McCulloch, GLAS’s […]

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