During the solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024, over a thousand people gathered in the Old Main Quad on the SUNY New Paltz campus to watch. Although the eclipse was only partial at New Paltz, it was still an exciting event. The Department of Physics and Astronomy set up 13 telescopes with either solar filters […]
In the past few days I’ve been following the playback of the Apollo 11 mission in “real time” (delayed exactly 50 years) at https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/. Among all the news related to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing I also found an article from NPR about about 3 different approaches to how to get […]
As we have done in past years, a small group of those interested came to Wooster Hall to observe the skylight lights cross over the staircase at Solar Noon (at 12:58:16 EDT). This year the actual Solstice (at 11:54 EDT) was very close to the same time, which is not always the case. Raj Pandya, […]
What a difference a year makes. Last year I made a time-lapse video of the Vernal equinox in Wooster Hall by standing next to a wall and taking a photo about once a minute for an hour. This year I have a much nicer video from a raspberry pi camera which captures an image every […]
A few weeks ago I visited Wooster Hall with a time-lapse camera to try to see what happens to the light from the skylight over the main staircase at solar noon on the Winter Solstice. I was a few days early, but even so, I think I uncovered the basic idea, which you can review […]
Wooster Hall at SUNY New Paltz has a neat feature: the main staircase is aligned directly North/South, and skylights are positioned above it so that at solar noon on the equinoxes the bottom of the staircase is illuminated by four columns of light which crawl slowly across the floor. It’s an exciting event on campus, […]
Unix computers have a simple command-line feature called “at” which lets you schedule a command, or a series of commands, to be run at a specific time. For example, if you want to download a large file in the middle of the night, when there is less congestion on the network, you can easily […]
Wooster Hall at SUNY New Paltz has a neat feature. The main staircase is exactly aligned along a north-south line, and skylight windows in the ceiling were placed so that light from those windows lines up at the bottom of the staircase at solar noon on the equinoxes. In the summer the sun is […]
Wooster Hall on the SUNY New Paltz campus was completely remodeled recently, and a neat new feature is an alignment of the skylight over the main stairway such that the bottom of the stairs is lit up at exactly solar noon on the Equinox (both spring and fall). This spring when I observed this I […]
The newly updated Wooster Hall has a neat feature at the bottom of the staircase between the first and second floors. Above that stair there is a large skylight with 4 windows, and at the bottom of the stairs there are markings on the floor that show where the shadows between those windows will be […]