PhD student Oriel Humes recently flew on Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which is NASA’s 747 airplane with a hole in the side of it through which a telescope points.
SOFIA soars over the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains with its telescope door open during a test flight. SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft.
Credits: NASA/Jim Ross
Oriel writes, “I wanted to share some of the pictures I took last week during my SOFIA flights. I flew on the 25th and 26th [of May]. We observed a target for the Trilling program on the 25th (Ino) and were scheduled to observe Siwa for my program on the 26th, but that target ended up getting switched to the 27th, so I wasn’t on that flight. This series also observed Sylvia on the 24th, and I got to take a sneak peek of that data on my flights too. We also observed some asteroids for Maggie McAdam’s program, along with some non-solar system targets including the galactic center, circumstellar disks, and AGB stars. All the flights in this series used FORCAST — here is a picture of me and the instrument at the back of the plane:
“Each flight was about nine hours long. While I was the only Guest Observer on the flights, I also flew alongside about a dozen teachers from the US and Germany as part of the SOFIA Education/Public Outreach programs. On the first night, I gave them a short presentation about my research with SOFIA and they asked a ton of really great questions!
On the second night, I went up to sit with the pilots in the cockpit during a leg where we flew over Flagstaff. The pilots turned the lights off for me so I could get these pictures.
