Knox students gain experience in Astronomy consortium

Since the dawn of time, humans have gazed at the stars, wondering what existed beyond the Earth and how the galaxies worked. With Knox College students and alumni involved, new discoveries about the stars and space are within reach.

Knox College, along with Macalester College, Augustana College, Coe College, and the University of Iowa, is part of the MACRO Consortium, which maintains and operates a remotely controlled robotic telescope in Sonoita, Arizona. The consortium's guiding principle is to provide transformational educational experiences with lasting impact while empowering students through hands-on problem-solving and scientific discovery to become enduring contributors to society.

The MACRO Consortium was founded in fall 2022, when Macalester, Coe, and Augustana assumed stewardship of the telescope from the University of Iowa. Associate Professor of Physics Nathalie Haurberg ’06 learned about the consortium through a Knox alumnus at Iowa and pursued a partial membership in the consortium in 2023. After working with the program for more than a year, Knox became a full-time partner in January 2025 and has immediately reaped the benefits. 

“It’s been extremely rewarding. We’re getting a lot more time out of the telescope since we began to participate fully,” Haurberg said. “This collaborative work model and the opportunity to work on a research-grade telescope doing real research in astronomy with research scientists, faculty, students, post-docs is very rare for undergraduates. It’s people with experience at multiple levels giving you their time and experience, but students also get to contribute. It’s extremely rare to get this kind of academic experience with people coming from multiple backgrounds with this level of expertise, and our students have access to all of them.”

Knox alumni have benefitted from the opportunity. Alexis Riggs ’24 co-authored the consortium’s first peer-reviewed paper for publication, and Philip Griffin ’20 also contributed to the paper. Both are currently in grad school, with Riggs at Minnesota and Griffin at Iowa. The paper, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal, presents new findings on two stars in the Rho Ophiuchi star formation complex. The paper reached the conclusion that Ophiuchi B is a brighter source of X-rays than rho Ophiuchi A. 

“I was one of a couple of people in charge of acquiring the data that MACRO provided for the paper,” Riggs said. “When Sean Gunderson (the paper’s first author) approached MACRO about acquiring optical-spectrum data for this paper, Alexandrea Moreno (another co-author) and I helped him work out what sort of observational coverage would be needed and figured out how to coordinate that with the observational needs of the consortium’s other active projects.”

The opportunities and experiences are ones Riggs will not take for granted, especially since she is now a published researcher.

“Working with MACRO has been such an amazing experience for me. I’ve gotten to work with a wonderful group of people on a wide range of research topics, including looking at variable stars in tandem with the VLA, collecting spectroscopic data on hundreds of emission line stars, and helping with the continual development and operation of the consortium’s shared telescope in Arizona.”

The VLA (Very Large Array) is one of the world's premier astronomical radio observatories. It consists of 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico.

Current Knox students involved with the program are expressing excitement about the opportunity to work with Haurberg and the consortium’s faculty. The experience has not only had an immediate impact, but one that students believe will pay off in the future.

“Nathalie is my advisor, and she invited a few of us to work on this,” said mathematics and physics major Isaac Groene ’26 of St. Louis, who is currently working on a paper based on research generated through the consortium. “It’s starting to get publications out, things are ramping up, it’s exciting. This is big for an undergraduate.”

While most work on the telescope is done remotely, students traveled to the telescope in fall 2025 to perform maintenance and repairs after a summer shutdown due to Arizona monsoons. Last spring, students also made a trip to Arizona to take classes, work on the telescope, and get more background.

“We went down there, it was like a large field trip,” Groene said. “We toured the facilities, and we went to Arizona State to see one of the two places that make the mirrors for the big telescopes. We were even able to operate our telescope at night. It was exciting to see the images and the capacity the large scopes have.”

Plans are in place for more work with the telescopes and the consortium as joint classes between the participating institutions continue. The program and collaboration are one of a kind and another example of the immersive research opportunities students can find at Knox.

“I think this is a huge opportunity you may not be able to get anywhere else; it is definitely an opportunity that is hard to not only get at other liberal arts colleges, but hard to get anywhere,” Hauberg said. “Because it’s small, students also get the attention and mentorship you expect at a liberal arts college. It is about as unique an opportunity as you can get.”