St. Lawrence – Decaseconds

Above St. Lawrence’s Campus

2018-Jul-16 adohertyhLeave a comment

I’ve often commented to curious colleagues that the benefit of drone photography is the ability to get images from that “impossible” space: lower than a helicopter or other light aircraft might dare fly, but higher than a photographer could reach with a cherry picker. Those are views that can only be had from building height, and so a drone let’s one (metaphorically) put a temporary building wherever they’d like, at least for photographic purposes.

I’m evidently not obeying that rule here, nearly 400 feet above St. Lawrence University’s sylvan campus. It’s from this height where the taper of from larger halls down to smaller dorms and townhouses, and then ultimately to wooded space at the eastern edge of campus, is visible.

Halloween Rainbow

2018-Jun-29 adohertyhLeave a comment

Summer research students at St. Lawrence have reached the halfway point (chronologically) of their projects, and the wildest (read: hottest) weather of the summer is coming along with it. At times like that, looking back on (and forward to) the cooler fall weather is a respite.

Spectroscopy Lab

2018-Jun-20 adohertyhLeave a comment

Approaching the summer solstice, the start of fall-semester classes and their attendant labs seems far away, but a new class of St. Lawrence first-year students will be here before I know it.

This was one of the light sources students were interrogating: a sodium lamp, like the ones used in street lights (at least in the twentieth century—LED street lamps are becoming increasingly dominant now.)

Lush Campus

2018-Jun-13 adohertyhLeave a comment

The long winter seems long behind us and campus is lush with flowering trees and grass carpets. Brush Quad, situated between St. Lawrence University’s oldest building (Richardson Hall) and its newest (Kirk Douglas Hall), looks particularly welcoming.

Above the Quad

2018-Apr-232018-Apr-23 adohertyhLeave a comment

This weekend marked the first truly warm days (i.e. spring) after a long winter, and there’s not long now until St. Lawrence’s students graduate on that sunset-lit quad at the center of the image.

Fall Visit

2018-Apr-13 adohertyhLeave a comment

Good landscape photography advice: take your pictures from the top of the second tallest structure (or drone) around and let the tallest structure (like St. Lawrence’s Gunnison Chapel) cross the horizon.

532 nm

2018-Apr-092018-Apr-09 adohertyh1 Comment

In St. Lawrence’s Raman spectroscopy and microscopy lab, the most potent laser illumination source comes from a neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet. This is a pretty ubiquitous laser source, but I happen to like it because it also demonstrates the value of nonlinear optics: though this laser is emitting light at 1064 nanometers (in the infrared), a suitable doubling crystal can combine two of those 1064 photons together to make a shiny new 532 nm photon.