jzahir

I only worked on optical systems that others had designed at Subaru Telescope, but while there I met Dr. Stephen Pompea of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.  He had worked with Nishimura San of Subaru when they were both at U of Arizona and “Nishi” was always kind enough to take me along when he visited with other scientists from the mainland.

Dr. Pompea has always been an evangelist for teaching optics to pre-high school youth and in 2003 he got an NSF grant for “Hands-on optics” which gave teaching materials to grade school teachers in optics.  I was invited to participate in the inaugural class held at USC in 2003 and was able to teach it to a few of the home-schooled kids in Spokane, Washington.

The class provided a large notebook and a wide range of projects for us to teach with, but I went beyond the materials provided and built optical rails, and other “toys” for kids to take home to play with.

The 1990’s was a wonderful time to be a hobbyist.

The contagious optimism of that time lent itself well to the enthusiasms of people happiest when immersed in new technology..

One of the hobbies that decade “launched” was high power rocketry.  There were always two reactions the first time anyone ever saw a launch of anything bigger than the “Estes”rockets you could buy at any hobby store:  Awe and fear that you could do more than take someone’s eye out.  To assuage such fears, the hobby community itself, the US Federal Aviation Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms provided strict regulations around the storage, purchase and use of any rocket motors with a specific impulse above 36 Lb-seconds.  In order to better assure that the hobbyist would align with these regulations, hobbyists associations coordinate the launches and supply amateurs with the supplies and training they need.

In 1996 I passed my level 1 certification and my level 2 in 1997.  In order to be certified to level 3 (allowing launch of rockets with a specific impulse exceeding 1,150 Lb-seconds) it was traditional to build something novel into the design.  In those days before cell phones and micro-power electronics the favorite was altimeter-based parachute deployment.

Mine was a pic-based system with a clunky altimeter and an enormous T-1 accelerometer but what I really wanted to study was what’s called the mach disks of the rocket’s exhaust.  This is actually a phenomena that reveals volumes about the sonics, plasma and nozzles of all jet and rocket propulsion.