Lee trying to revive a filter wheel controller in Chile

Instrumentation

In the Spring of 1985, I entered Appalachian State University to begin work on my B.S. in Physics/Astronomy. Soon afterwards, I began working for Dan Caton. Much of my work involved observing eclipsing binary stars, but by the end of my second year, I was doing about 50 % instrumentation design. This work involved building and installing, as well as helping to maintain, instrumentation for the 16- and 18-inch telescopes at Appalachian's Dark Sky Observatory (DSO).

After graduating from Appalachian in 1988 with a degree in Physics/Astronomy, I decided to remain at Appalachian and pursue my Master's degree in Applied Physics/Instrumentation for Astronomy. During this time, I designed and built a three-channel photometer.

After graduating from Appalachian in 1990 with an M.S., I accepted the position of Instrumentation Engineer for the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium (KNAC). Since that time, I have supervised upgrades of the 24" Telescope at Wellesley College , along with major upgrades at Swarthmore and Vassar Colleges. Additionally, I have helped install and maintain modern CCD systems and Unix workstations at the schools of KNAC.

1994 saw a new phase begin in my instrumentation career. In November, I traveled to Putre, Chile with the Williams College total solar eclipse expedition to assist in setting up and running their eclipse experiments.

In 1995, I traveled to Mukandargh, India with Williams to observe the solar eclipse there. My main responsibility was running the coronal temperature mapping experiment, which, along with Bryce Babcock, Dave Berger, and Kevin Reardon, I redesigned for the 1995 eclipse to take into account the much shorter totality in India (~49 seconds). The experiment went well in general.

In 1998 I traveled to the Aruba, Netherlands Antilles total solar eclispe. Due to technical problems, my coronal temperature mapping experiment was unsuccessful.

After much preparation and revising of the temperature experimental technique, I again traveled with the Williams College group to a total solar eclipse, this time to Ramnicu Vilcea, Romania. Our site was on the top of a hotel near the point of maximum eclipse duration. Despite the unusual technical headaches, and lots of worry about the local weather, we had quite good skies during the 2 minutes and 23 seconds of totality. All of our experiments worked well, gathering good data for mapping the temperature of the corona, looking for oscillations in the corona (a possible mechanism for coronal heating), and and experiment to help calibrate out the scattered light in the SOHO satellite coronograph.

Finally, During the Summer of 1999, I accepted the position of Observatory Assistant/Engineer for my alma mater, Appalachian State University. I work in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, maintaining, upgrading, and developing new instrumentation for ASU's Dark Sky (DSO) and Rankin Science (RSO) Observatories. I plan to continue my instrumentation research at Appalachian.