Dr. Eliot Halley Vrijmoet

   VRY-MOOT   (he/him)

Education/Research Postdoc Fellow
of the Five College Astronomy Department

Department of Astronomy
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

Office: McConnell 410A at Smith
     (LGRT 680 at UMass)

E-mail: evrijmoet@smith.edu      @eliothalley

Teaching

In Fall semesters I teach Observational Techniques I (AST 337) at Smith. In this course, students learn to take photometry using research-grade telescopes and build data reduction pipelines in Python.

In Spring semesters I teach Observational Techniques II (AST 341/390A) at Smith. This course guides students through designing and carrying out their own observational astronomy research projects.

To date, I have supervised 3 Smith students and 1 GSU student in extracurricular research with astrometry of low-mass stars, plus 23 students on eclipsing binaries and stellar activity via AST 341. I plan to take additional students in Spring 2026.

Previous Teaching

Life in the Universe (Fall 2021, GSU): We explored how life forms and survives, how scientists search for life in the Solar System, and the context we have gained from recent exoplanet discoveries. For this course I created all my own lectures, homeworks, projects, and exams.

Astro labs (2016-2020, GSU; 2015-2016, SDSU): These labs accompany the ASTR 1010 and 1020 courses. We covered intro astro topics such as the Moon, Solar System, galaxy classification, stellar spectral types, variable stars, etc. Each lab "section" involved guiding 24 students through a 2-hour activity once per week.