Randall Laboratory of Physics, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040
- Office location: 352 West Hall
- Telephone: 734-764-9278
- FAX: 734-936-6529
- E-mail: akerlof@umich.edu
In the photograph on the left, the yellow box is a device for determining the surface temperature of the Sun. By measuring solar light intensities at several different wavelength bands, the solar temperature can be determined from Planck’s spectral distribution. This apparatus is now incorporated as one of the twelve experiments performed by students for Physics 391 - Introduction to Modern Physics Lab.
A Leonid Meteor Explodes
The images were all recorded on the morning of November 17, 1998. The images are labelled by the start of the exposure, Mountain Standard Time. The exposure duration was 60 seconds for all images. For detailed information, click here.
After making the first simultaneous optical detection of a gamma-ray burst, GRB990123, with the camera array named ROTSE-I, Akerlof set out to construct much more sensitive detectors culminating in ROTSE-III. Four such systems were built and installed in Texas, Australia, Namibia and Turkey. The photo above shows him at the enclosure entrance for ROTSE-IIId sited at the Turkish National Observatory at Bakirlitepe.
Fortunately, we never had to deal with cosmic threats to our existence!