April 26th, 2009 Today is a Sunday and I finally finished my presentation. I worked on it until almost midnight. It was really exhausting, but I'm glad I had finished my diagrams a couple of days ago or it probably would have taken me longer. The longest part was figuring out where to put every piece of information on the tri-fold board. We had to follow a certain order so that the audience would be able to follow the steps exactly as we went through them. April 23rd, 2009 So the past couple of days I've been working on diagrams to put on my poster board. I wasn't sure what to use for my diagrams at first but Dr. Noe told me what the most important things to be shown were. So I made a diagram of my setups, and the way the light behaved in each different case. It was pretty time consuming but I really do feel we've made it pretty far now. We are almost done. April 16th, 2009 Today I explained my project to one of the WISE rotations that are working at the LTC. It was good practice to piece everything together. I was a little nervous but after a little while everything finally came together and I felt really good about my project. I was also able to take pictures of the set up and the light spots which actually came out great. I think we'll be ready to start putting everything together very soon. April 9th, 2009. We have kept working on the same set up, but we would like to create something that we can bring to URECA and be able to show everyone what we saw. We don't know if that will be possible yet but we're hoping we can carry the rail where the lenses are over to the SAC. Next week I will be taking pictures of the spots formed and of the set up itself. April 7th, 2009 We have started gathering all the elements needed to create a setup such as 125 mm lens, a cylinder lens, beam splitter, a fiber tip, and laser. We created a simple set up that seems to be working so far. Of course we will probably be making adjustments in the next couple of days. Presentations for URECA are coming up so we have a limited time left. When we direct the laser tip through the lenses and move the 125mm lens back and forth we obtained the change in the shape of the light from vertical to horizontal with a perfect circle in the middle of the distance change. It is pretty interesting to observe our hypothesis come true. April 2nd, 2009 Dr. Noe and I have finally come up with an idea of what to do next. We are thinking of recreating the optics within a CD player in a larger scale so we can really observe the light spots and observe what happens as we move the lens in and out. I think this will really work out great since it is easier to be able to perceive something in a larger scale. We will probably have some sort of set up that will be simple enough to put together but at the same time we can obtained the wanted results. Date ?? We have not made further advancements on the project. I feel as though we may have hit a bump on the road at this point. We have gotten distracted with the many things going on around us. We've had a couple of visitors and the colloquiums take away time from the project.  We've been discussing many ideas of where to go next and hopefully we'll figure something out soon. We want to be able to do something that can be shown to the public. March 12th, 2009 I definitely advanced on my project today. I was able to take accurate measurements of the zero, first and second order spots of the data CD with both the red-helium laser and the blue-argon laser. I also measured the distance from the CD to the white board. I calculated the spacing of each track, knowing that the wavelength of the red laser is 0.632 microns. The result came out to be 1.66 microns, which is accurate. I then calculated the wavelength of the blue-argon laser using the answer obtained for the spacing (1.66). The wavelength obtained was 0.489 microns. Dr. Noe and me checked to see the known wavelengths for such lasers and decided that the one used must have had a 0.488 wavelength, my results are not 100% precise but they are within a 1% error. I am pretty content with all the progress made today. I will probably do the same for an audio CD and compare the results to the data obtained for a data disc. March 9th, 2009 Today was a pretty interesting day. We had a very important visitor in the Laser Teaching Center. Miles Padget a professor at the University of Glasgow in the U.K. and very important figure in the optics world was at Stony Brook to serve as the speaker for the colloquium. He stopped by the LTC and I had a chance to meet him. He was a very knowledgeable man who had ideas pouring out of him. It was fascinating to hear what he had to say, and to be able to take some of his advice on my project. I was a little intimidated when he addressed me and asked me about my project. I responded as well as I could and happy to get his feedback. The colloquium that followed was very interesting even though I could not follow it completely. The parts that I did understand were pretty cool. I have to say that thus far this was my favorite colloquium of all. Perhaps because it was much more closely associated with my project. February 17th, 2009 We were lucky enough today to burn things! Yes, today we went outside and burned paper with a magnifying glass. We also measured with a photodetector the luminosity of the sun vs. a light bulb. It was interesting to see that even at around 4 PM when the sun is already setting, its luminosity is about 6 times greater than that of a light bulb. The burning part was the best though. We used a regular magnifying glass and black construction paper. We looked for the focal point of the light passing through the magnifying glass and focused it on a spot of the paper. The key as Dr. Noe told us is to place both the glass and the paper perpendicular to the source of light. Once you do that, it takes nothing but time. I burned my initials onto the paper, and I will definitely keep it as part of a great memory. After having all the fun, we headed back inside and put our thinking caps on. Dr. Noe reviewed some general information about optics with us. We learned what light rays were, how polarized light works, what an index of refraction is, and how long a mirror must be to be considered a full length mirror. It was overall one of the most fulfilling sessions we've had thus far. We not only were able to have a little fun, but we also learned and utilized our brains.