Shelvean Kapita '10
 Former El Salvador President Francisco Flores (L-R) with Shelvean Kapita ’10; Mark Crain, chair of policy studies; and Maria Marcela Vega ’09. |
Surveying the Sky
Arecibo is an important center for research in radio astronomy, atmospheric sciences, and planetary radar. With a 305m diameter reflector, the Arecibo telescope is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope that mankind has ever built.
I was working on a project called ALFALFA (Arecibo Legacy Fast Alfa Survey), which was commenced in 2005 for the purpose of locating distant galaxies that emit radio signals. The project is expected to survey about 7,000 square degrees of the sky and detect more than 25,000 radio-wave emitting galaxies from a range of about 3 to 750 million light years away.
We spent whole nights observing and doing data analysis, and then went to bed in the morning, woke up in the afternoon, and walked around the evergreen environs of the observatory getting ready for the next observing session.
As I learned how to operate the telescope, keep track of new data files, and do the closing operations at the end of each observation session, I developed an appreciation for the importance of computer programming in modern astronomy. It was a thrilling experience to work on such a project – the mere thought that the waves we were detecting had left their sources millions of years ago was enough to keep me awake the whole night.
— Shelvean Kapita
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Shelvean Kapita ’10 did radio astronomy research with Lyle Hoffman, professor of physics, at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico.
MAJORS
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