Does someone have any information that could help this
person with his class? If so, please contact him directly.
Thanks,
Michael Portuesi
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Wind farms vs. seeing
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:43:13 -0400
From: Jim Houck <JRH13@No-Spam>
To: info@No-Spam
Hi,
We have an observatory near Ithaca NY that has been used by advanced
undergraduates at Cornell for the past fifteen years. The students do
everything from learning constellations and viewing the "current"
planets to making HR diagrams and galaxy rotation curves. The course is
a big hit and regularly turns away student for lack of space.
The 25 inch telescope, its software and instruments are all student
built. The mount was designed by a mechanical engineering student as a
senior project and built by the local vocational high school. The
instruments include an optical imager (home made and LN2 cooled CCD), an
optical spectrograph (rotation curves and nebular spectroscopy also home
made) and an infrared camera (used in brown dwarf searches, again home
made) were built by undergraduates over the course of many years. We
have a rather lack luster web site at: http://astrosun2.astro.
<http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro410/HBO/>*cornell*.edu/academics/courses/astro410/*HBO*/
<http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro410/HBO/>
A new challenge (threat) has appeared in the last few weeks: they want
to build a wind farm on the same hilltop as the observatory. The
proposal is for eight 1.5 MW turbines. The closes is planned for just
600 feet up wind from the telescope.
My question is: do you have any data/experience of the seeing effects
from windfarms? The project is moving very quickly, and I need whatever
information you have as soon as possible.
SIncerely,
Jim Houck
Kenneth A. Wallace Professor
http://astro.cornell.edu/people/facstaff-detail.php?pers_id=106
Received on Tue Apr 12 07:33:15 2005