January 2008

PEDL Manager John Getty has transferred to Montana Tech.  Until he is replaced, PEDL can be contacted by the normal phone number or email:

January 2007

Comet McNaught

Comet McNaught brightened to a visual magnitude of about +1.0 on January 7, 2007, making it the brightest comet in about 30 years.  The pictures below were taken on January 11, 2007 just after sunset from a spot just a few miles north of Bozeman, Montana.   The comet can be difficult to pick out in some of these pictures, but is quite obvious when looking at a full-screen image.

Photos by John Getty. 

First Sighting Full Size Image 300mm, F5.6, Shutter 1/25s

Solo Full Size Image The comet is visible just to the right of the central saddle, about 2/3rd of the way up the picture. 100mm, F6.3 Shutter 1/25s

Long Tail Full Size Image 300mm, F6.3, Shutter 1/5s

McNaught Sets Full Size Image 70mm,F13, Shutter 2s The head of Comet McNaught is just on the horizon at the sharp peak to the right.  Upper left in this photo is Venus.

November 2005

Study: Totally Blank Email

Over the last couple of years I have received a number of emails that have malformed, non-compliant Internet headers, such that no sender, subject or recipient are identified and the body is completely blank (is that a redundant redundancy?)

A Google search on "totally blank email" reveals that receipt of these messages is not uncommon, however no plausible explanation been found in the materials examined to date.   Receipt of these emails appears to be independent of the platform.

Explanations found during internet searches offer little insight.  Several web forums have spent endless bits posting ideas that do not fit the observations or are unsupportable including:

Because someone sent it to you.

maybe someone messing with their smtp server or
programming something

those emails .. are the Davinia.B email worm.

Suspicion points to the mail server.

Information gathered to date refutes all but the last interpretation.  However, headers examined so far indicate the source varies.  The most recent example 

Users of the MSU Physics domain have been polled to help gather data to see if an explanation can be found.  Updates on that effort will be posted here.

November 2004

Spectacular Aurora Borealis display
visible from Bozeman

At about midnight on November 7, 2004  an auroral display awed even the experts in the field.

A short movie (2.6MB) of the event has been assembled by John Getty.  The individual frames are exposures about 10 seconds in length and about 30 seconds apart. The pictures were taken with a Minolta Dimage 5 digital camera, lens zoomed out, f:2.5, set to 800 ASA.  The photos were taken from Mr. Getty's driveway in Bozeman, looking toward the north east.

April 2004

ILX Lightwave of Bozeman Montana has donated surplus equipment and supplies, with a current value of about $70,000, to the Physics Department.  Len Schmidt at ILX, working with John Getty from the PEDL, was instrumental in the arranging the donation.

Some of the equipment, for example an industrial thermal oven, will be used in the PEDL.  A spectrum analyzer was placed with the Cone research group and ICAL has installed an uninterruptible power supply on their scanning electron microscope. 

The donation impacted departments well beyond Physics.  The Industrial and Mechanical Engineering Department has installed some of the donated under-desk CPU holders in their CIM lab.  Chemistry was provided with a number of high quality temperature controllers for integration in experiments in that department.

The Physics Department and MSU offer their deep gratitude to ILX for their substantial generosity.