Astronomer Undergrad Humour

Carleton College, MN is one of the very good Small Liberal Arts Colleges in the US.
It houses the Goodsell Observatory and has produced many excellent astronomers, some of whom retain the famous Carleton sense of humour, still.



Goodsell Observatory then

This week, the Observatory got dressed



click to embiggen

With sound effects.

I predict these students will do very well indeed in grad school.

Awesome.

Carleton: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - A Capella

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Awesome! That is very creative, and it gets my seal of approval.

(If I had one, rather, it would.)

What I like in astronomers is their telescope nomenclature.

VLT - Very Large Telescope
ELT - Extremely Large Telescope
OWL - Overwhelmingly Large Telescope

And so on. Unfortunately, they seem to have exhausted the list of superlatives lately :(

By Alex Besogonov (not verified) on 03 Jun 2010 #permalink

Alex: It looks like they skipped over ULT (Ultra Large Telescope) and SLT (Super Large Telescope). I guess the next step will have to be TOUS (Telescope Of Unusual Size).

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 03 Jun 2010 #permalink

Eric Lund - Wouldn't it be better if your Super Large Telescope be labled as a Super Large Universal Telescope?

Craig (Heinke) and I were enjoying these photos last night. It may not surprise you that Craig is a Carleton alum.

i went to Carleton and have actually used the 16.2" refractor to look at saturn. it was cool.

Actually, it's "Super Huge Interferometric Telescope" :)

By Alex Besogonov (not verified) on 03 Jun 2010 #permalink

I'm a fan of
"Practical Joke Huge Telescope"
But sadly it does not make an interesting acronym, so it will never be accepted in the scientific community.

By Morejello (not verified) on 03 Jun 2010 #permalink

Lovely!

By the way, the students at Carleton and St. Olaf colleges, and the youth of the city of Northfield, Minnesota in general, were the victims of a somewhat hilarious slander by a egomaniacal police chief and a waspish scold of a newspaper columnist who I like to call "Miss Gulch". (See here for an explanation.) These two persons joined forces to accuse the sleepy little college town, whose last bit of true notoriety came in 1876 when its citizens broke up the James-Younger Gang, of being a horribly decadent lair of heroin addicts.

Seriously, they did.