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

*New* e-mail: evrijmoet@smith.edu      @eliothalley

Teaching

In Fall 2025 I will be away on family leave, although usually I would teach Observational Techniques I (AST 337) at Smith College. Previously, I taught this course in Fall 2024, and co-taught it in 2023 with K. Ward-Duong. In this course students learn to take photometry using research-grade telescopes and build data reduction pipelines in Python.

In Spring 2024 and 2025 I taught Observational Techniques II, held as AST 341 at Smith and 390A at UMass. This course guides students through designing and carrying out their own observational astronomy research projects.

To date, I have supervised ~3 Smith students doing research with astrometry of low-mass stars. I plan to take additional students when I return 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): These labs accompany the ASTR 1010 and 1020 courses. We cover 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.