Hello and welcome to the Penn State Astronomy & Astrophysics Grads' Web Resources Page!
The Penn State Astronomy & Astrophysics graduate program is a fast growing one that has coupled emerging research facilities with a young, and energetic faculty. Students enjoy a close, friendly research environment and have access to resources such as the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, and the new Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer Mission. Research opportunities include both observational and theoretical studies of black holes, Gamma-Ray bursts, AGN, QSO absorption lines, stellar astronomy, and extra-solar planets. Students are also becoming involved in developing instruments in optical, IR, X-ray, and radio.
This page is a portal to various web resources available for current and prospective graduate students in the Department. These pages are student-maintained, so they'll always have a very informal look and feel.
Here is a short description of the websites you can access from this portal:
- Grad Bios - short biographical sketches
of the grad students and recent graduates. We encourage all
prospective students to stop by this page to learn a little
about the current students and get a glimpse at what it's like
to be a grad in the Department. Page currently managed by Emily
Alicea-Muñoz.
- Grad Calendars - calendars arranged
by academic time period, with highlights on the dates that are
of importance to the grad students (lunch talks, proposal and
fellowship deadlines, birthdays, outreach activities, etc).
Archives go back to Summer 2004. Calendars created and maintained
by Kim Herrmann.
- PSU Thesis Files - instructions and
advice about writing a PhD thesis in accordance with the rules
and regulations of the University; all the necessary files are
included. Page includes links to official PSU Graduate School
pages dealing with the thesis stuff. Very useful page when the
thesis-writing time comes around. Page created by Michele
Stark.
- Committees - here you can find out
who belongs to what committee. Archiving starts Fall 2005.
- Grunch - schedule of cookers and
speakers for the biweekly Graduate Lunch. Archiving starts
Fall 2005.
- South Park Gallery - cartoon alter-egos of the grads and [some] professors in the Department. It's a fun little distraction. Try to identify the people without reading the ALT text. Input for the "southparkizations" come from various persons, including sometimes the persons themselves who are being "southparkified". Page maintained by Judy Racusin.
If anyone out there thinks we're missing something important in the page, email Emily [ealicea@astro.psu.edu] or Jian [jwu@astro.psu.edu], and we'll try to include your suggestion as soon as possible. And for those wondering about the pretty astronomy pictures in this page: the background image is the Chandra Deep Field. The images on the title banner are, clockwise from top-left: Saturn, artist rendering of a black hole with accretion disk, artist rendering of a black hole tidally disrupting a star, artist rendering of gravitational waves, Seyfert's Sextet, Crab Nebula, Trapezium Cluster, and a little cartoon of an astronomer looking through a telescope.