Summer Sky Over Hartford

There’s a bit of irony that a 10-year reunion, an opportunity to wander around campus and feel nostalgia, occurs during the summer—a season when I never experienced campus when actually a student.

My favorite little detail of this image is the airplane contrail just past the crescent moon.

Summer Sky Over Hartford

Clement Academy of Chemistry

Trinity College’s Chemistry Department, site of the invention of cyanoacrylate adhesives, still resides in the neo-gothic Clement Hall. During our time there in the early 2000s, the Harry-Potter-esque design combined with the “magical” reactions we ran made it easy to view the building as precisely the place real-world wizards would work.

Clement Academy of Chemistry

Fields of St. Lawrence

Battling the breezes of late summer above the fallow fields of the North Country, this image might appear to be capturing the edge of a farm. In fact, this is the southeastern reach of St. Lawrence University’s rural campus. The stables, home of our IHSA riding team, are off in the distance.

Fields of St. Lawrence

Lasers

The hours I spend in the physics and chemistry labs of St. Lawrence University make me a bit inured to the optical shenanigans occurring when we take Raman spectra of the materials my students synthesize. Still, the effect is pretty fantastic. The grainy pattern of the laser on surfaces around lab is fantastic, but the fluorescence ink on the post-it note in the foreground fluorescing aggressively is pretty cool, too.

Homebuilt Raman Apparatus

That violet-blue light in the background of the shot above is the 405 nm laser we use to initiate photochemical processes. The beam is poorly detected by the camera’s sensor, but the slightest hint of it is visible in the upper third of the image below.

405 nm

Appleton Under Construction

St. Lawrence University is renovating its historic Apple Arena, home of the Skating Saints, and the project is entering its final phases. Back in May, however, the foundations were just being poured and the skeleton of the structure was laid bare. Can you spot the steeple of Gunnison Memorial Chapel on the horizon?

Appleton Under Construction