For the past few years, the UMBC Observatory was happy to host mentees and mentors from the UMBC REACH Initiative. REACH is a mentorship program at UMBC for women who are interested in
pursuing STEM fields. UMBC [student] mentors work alongside high school
students to help them gain experience in the fields of STEM they might
not have been aware of before.
At our most recent event, we discussed how cameras work within our instrumentation. Everything from our own telescope Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) to cameras in general to smartphone cameras.
We talked about how different telescopes work, what they do, the things that we can learn from careful observations. In all of this the underlying topics is how we use light to figure all of this out!
After the discussion on instrumentation, we toured the observatory, and gave physical examples of the topics in the talk.