Rhett Herman sat in his office in Curie Hall last week poring over a group of strip charts, each marked in jagged blue lines with sudden large peaks. Each peak—there were two or three on some pages—represented an arm of the spiraling Milky Way galaxy.

The charts were produced by a handful of Radford University students who took a working field trip with Herman in late January to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va.

From Friday night through Sunday afternoon, the students accompanying Herman, a physics professor at Radford University, explored the ins and outs of radio astronomy by scanning the far-reaching arms of the galaxy with a 1960s-era radio telescope and recording the data on an old-school chart machine.

All of this work, the professor noted, took place in a small underground bunker near the very location at which astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake famously calculated 50 years ago the likelihood of other civilizations existing in our galaxy.   

The purpose of the working field trip was not to look for alien life forms, although Herman is open to such findings, but to give the five participating students an opportunity to learn through practice about radio astronomy and how it works. The professor explained that the charts are "what computers massage into shiny space pictures that are released to the public."

"The scans showing several calculations of Doppler shifts of the base hydrogen frequency are done for each part of a galactic arm that we were looking at," Herman said. "For example, one scan shows the calculations for the four large concentrations of hydrogen in one direction, telling us that we were looking through either four arms, or three arms with one of the arms folding back around itself."

For the students, the journey to Green Bank was an exercise in learning to collect, observe and calculate data in the same fashion that scientists discern the structure of our galaxy. Participant Alec Frazier, who is majoring in physics with minors in math and astronomy, said one short-term goal for the data is to "work out a rough shape" of the galaxy.

Herman elaborated. "If you look over here," he said, pointing to his left, "we're looking through one arm, and we know that is the outside of the galaxy." Pointing to another sheet, Herman said, "If we see a high-intensity signal, we know that's the core of the galaxy. And if we look up and see nothing, we know that's intergalactic space."  

The crew of Herman, Frazier, David Heras, Marcus Jesse, Sarah Montgomery and Sylvia Phillips shot three dozen scans through the 40-foot-diameter radio telescope. Their goal was to examine the galactic structure and calculate the thickness of the central part of the galaxy, which Herman noted, "from the crude calculations we have, is about 15,000 light years thick."

Getting the right shot with the radio telescope can be tricky, Herman said, because it moves only up and down, not side to side, forcing its users to wait until the Earth rotates the telescope to the desired object.

"The students had to learn about the galactic coordinates and how they relate to Earth because things are a little bit wonky in space, and we're in the outskirts of a galaxy, we're tilted, and we're spinning," Herman said. "If you can't get your object when it comes around, you're out of luck. You have to wait 24 hours to try again."

Herman has taken student groups to Green Bank, located in the mountainous terrain of West Virginia's Pocahontas County, nearly every year since 2002 to work, study and learn about radio astronomy.

"We don't take 'Gee whiz, let's look at things!' field trips," Herman said with pride. "We go on 'Let's do stuff' field trips. Ours are working trips like this one, where students got a good understanding of radio astronomy."