Hi ACM,
First of all, we have a special opportunity to share with you from Professor Pat Kelly: "Dear ACM,
I'm a professor in the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics, and our team is constructing two sets of robotically operated telescopes on mountains in New Mexico and Greece.
The principal goals are to find supernovae at the time of explosion and light from radioactive material synthesized when neutron stars and black holes merge. We are planning to search the sky after the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detects gravitational wave emission from the mergers of these extreme objects.
We are using a modified telescope mount that can slew across the sky in less than two seconds and are trying to assemble a number of different components that will independently position two telescopes on the mount to cover the area on the sky where the gravitational waves may originate (can be hundreds of square degrees).
Here is a video about the project -- we are running a prototype telescope on the St. Paul campus that we are using for development:
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/u-m-leading-1-million-grant-build-superfast-turbo-telescopes
A current effort is to develop a software pipeline to process 1.3 Gigapixels of imaging every thirty seconds and identify candidate explosions. We have figured out a way to use the new 4090 GPU's from NVidia to process the images extremely rapidly (<10 seconds), and are now working on several challenges including using machine learning to distinguish between explosions and artifacts in the images. We need a lot of help!
If there are any students with experience with robotics, motor control, or software who might want to join, I would be very interested in working with them or employing them during the school year to work on the project. Very happy to show students around the lab and the prototype."
UNIX Class #3 this Tuesday, Oct. 1, 5:30pm in Amundson B75! This week is about your Programming Environment! Come for free pizza, stay for genuinely useful knowledge that will inevitably be useful for your classes at some point (professors may simply expect you to know this stuff). Remember to RSVP so we get enough pizza. Next week's topic is Dependencies & Nix.
Other Important ACM Notices:
ACM is closed for rest of day today (Monday 9/30) for carpet cleaning.
If you want to get ACM member benefits (clubroom door access, free server/VM, extra discord channels), you must:
Come and sign in to 3 events.
Fill out member form (acm.umn.edu/member).
Notify an officer that you completed the form.
Come to Open House Wednesday 4-6pm in Keller 2-204 (ACM room).
See you and good luck,
Quinn