Happy New Year! And a heartfelt Thank You to our Donors.
2024 was an exciting year for ACE, and we anticipate an even more thrilling 2025. One change we’re implementing is in our student blogs.
In response to many donors expressing interest in the career paths of ACE graduates, we will feature a few alumni this year, highlighting their graduation years and current employment.
To kick off 2025, we are pleased to share an internship experience from Mahmoud Hallak at the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) at the Green Bank Observatory. We hope you enjoy it!
A Summer in Greenbank
By: Mahmoud Hallak
A little background about myself for this article – my name is Mahmoud Hallak, and I am a rising senior at Brown University. This summer, I had the opportunity to intern at the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) at the Green Bank Observatory, home to the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.
Living in Green Bank had many quirks: no Wi-Fi, no cellular service, an average of just one person per square mile, and the nearest grocery store was an hour away. Despite this, we found plenty to do: hiked the beautiful trails of West Virginia, swam, biked around the massive radio telescopes, stargazed while doing astrophotography, and enjoyed smaller things like lying on the grass to watch sunsets and counting deer.
My internship began with an onboarding week, during which interns from other NRAO sites visited Green Bank. We learned to operate the 40-foot telescope, and mapped the core of the Milky Way. This summer, the GBT was under maintenance, and bridge inspectors assessed the structure. This meant I got to have a personal tour of the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), which I experienced three times. Unfortunately, no digital photography was allowed, so I have only film photographs from that visit. As we climbed the stairs, the bare metal beams made it resemble a truss bridge more than a traditional radio telescope, the scale was even harder to assess from on top of the telescope.
As part of my internship, I mentored and chaperoned 20 rising high school students from disadvantaged communities who camped in a bunkhouse for two weeks. Along with three other chaperones, we taught them about radio astronomy, guided them in their group projects, and the hardest task of all, made sure they slept and got up on time! My group’s project focused on analyzing Andromeda, our neighboring galaxy. My students used both the 40-foot telescope and the 20-meter telescope to study it in the radio spectrum. At the end of their project, they presented their findings, determining the galaxy’s mass with impressive accuracy using the radial velocity curves. Mentoring these 14-year-olds as they calculated the mass of a galaxy was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had teaching astronomy. They were so excited and willing to learn concepts that took me semesters of study.
Astrophotography was another highlight of my time at Green Bank. The skies were mostly clear throughout the summer, and the lack of light pollution offered stunning views. The intern house was isolated, so when we turned off the lights, we were surrounded by starlight and moonlight. One of the employees let me borrow a star tracker, which I used with my Nikon D7000 camera to capture images.
To conclude my time at Green Bank, I presented my project, which involved optimizing the radio frequency interference graphical user interface. This optimization made the GUI 15 times faster at retrieving data and will hopefully be used across other radio observatories beyond GreenBank.
Now that I have access to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth headphones again, I find myself missing that level of disconnection. While it had its drawbacks—like running home in pitch-dark forests at midnight because I couldn’t reach anyone or getting locked out of my bank because I couldn’t complete 2-factor authentication—I found that with less access to the connected world, I grew closer to my surroundings and formed stronger friendships.