History of HOU

Nov 2008 The number of new asteroid discoveries remains at 23 but the list of NEO observations is long and includes many of IASC students. The current campaign continues until December 5, 2008, and we expect still more original discoveries and important contributions to the measurements of the impact threatening near-Earth objects.

2008 Jul 2 HOU/Spitzer Student Project: Alekzandir Morton and Thomas Travagli presented their research on determining the redshift of S5 0716+714 at the California State Science Fair and were awarded first place in the Senior Division of Physics and Astronomy. They were mentored by SSC scientist Mark Lacy. The students were awarded a $1000 scholarship each. Articles about them were published by the Contra Costa Times and in the Antioch Press. John Michael Santiago, who assisted with the data reduction on the WZ Sge project, received a 4th place award at the Contra Costa Science and Engineering Fair. ---Jeff Adkins [HOU teacher]

2008 April 18 Patrick Miller reports that so far in the International Asteroid Search Campaign (IASC), concluding Friday, May 2, 2008, students found 6 new asteroids, 6 VIO (virtual impactor observations), 4 published NEO observations, and 26 unpublished NEO confirmations. Congratulations to VIII LO, Katowice (Poland), the UAI Minor Planets (Italy) and students from China Hands-On Universe for the discovery of two new Main Belt asteroids!!

Asteroid K08GB1Z
S. Foglia; UAI Minor Planets (Italy)
B. Lanuszny, Z. Adamus, K.Gibinski, & A.Mucha; VIII LO, Katowice (Poland)

Asteroid K08GB1Y
S. Foglia; UAI Minor Planets (Italy)
M. Zhou; China Hands-On Universe

2008 Jun 13 Update From: Patrick Miller: We have a list of schools participating in the 2007-2008 asteroid campaigns (plus one pilot supernova campaign). We've changed the name of IASC from International Asteroid Search Campaign to International Astronomical Search Collaborative (still calling it "Isaac"). The plan is to completely develop the supernova search campaign and including search campaigns for Kuiper Belt objects and comets.
Since October 2006 at the start of IASC, 97 schools have participated from 9 countries. The countries include China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, Russia, and United States.
Students from these schools have discovered 82 asteroids, made 2 comet confirmations, 6 virtual impactor observations, and hundreds of near-Earth object confirmations. As far as the most number of discoveries, I don't have this recorded but I believe the schools from Poland hold this title. Some schools have discovered as many as 4 asteroids, as I recall.

Dec 2007
International Asteroid Search Campaign

Teachers and students have successfully completed the Fall 2007 IASC search campaigns. There were a total of 38 new Main Belt asteroids discovered, with 2 more waiting to be announced....2007 VSK1 and 2007 WG00. There were 24 schools participating from 7 countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Poland, Portugal, and United States)...15 were high schools and 9 were colleges. The Spring 2008 campaigns start on February 1, 2008, will include a total 9 countries including China and Russia. See more details on the Asteroid Discoverers.

16 July 2007. Gruber Cosmology Prize.

HOU Co-director and founder Carl Pennypacker has shared a prize with members of the team he helped found that led to the discovery of evidence for Dark Energy. Please see:

1. LBNL article that refers to Carl as the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) co-founder.
   
2. 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize Press Release with a list of the SCP tea

May 10-11, 2007. Hands-On-Universe Holds Teachers’ Workshop in Kenya. Excerpt: For high school students in the Republic of Kenya in Eastern Africa, star-gazing was enhanced by Hands-On-Universe (HOU), .... On May 10th and 11th, HOU held an Internet teleconference workshop for nearly a dozen teachers at Kenya High School, a national residency school for girls. This is the first HOU workshop to be held on the continent of Africa.
“There are certain images and concepts that transcend backgrounds and capture everyone's imaginations. Turning a telescope to the sky opens that view to everyone and spurs them to learn more. The HOU program provides an excellent opportunity to continue and spread this activity and interest,” said George Smoot, an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. Full article at Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics and workshop movie (330 MB)

March 2007. You are welcome to visit the EU-HOU web site and download the Windows Media movie of the Lunar - Saturn occultation of March 2, 2007. See also Saturn occultation of 22 May 2007 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3nk6wvnrCA

--Lech Mankiewicz

Spring 2006. HOU teacher Jeff Adkins and students in the Antioch ESPACE Academy at Deer Valley High School (DVHS) have observed Active Galactic Nuclei on the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope as well as with ground based scopes. Project results are online at http://www.espaceacademy.com (click on the Spitzer Space Telescope picture).
DVHA students also did well at their county science fair. See details on the HOU Teacher News page and the ESPACE press release page. Many thanks to all of the programs from NOAO, the Spitzer Science Center, HOU, and elsewhere that allowed our students to succeed.

HOU was featured in a report on the Internet Scout project of National Science Digital Library (NSDL).

From Janesville Gazette article: "Observatory moves to new mission of drawing students into astronomy" by Chris Schultz, July 3, 2006
  "Daniel Pryke and brothers Orion and Rowan Danou, 5 and 3, watched with awe as Yerkes Observatory's 40-inch refracting telescope swung into operation.
  "Yerkes is now a key part of Hands-On Universe . . .
' This is not education in which people come in and lecture in a classroom,' [Yerkes Science Director Kyle Cudworth] said. 'We're helping students work with real data.' "

From Janesville Gazette article about HOU/Yerkes Observatory: "Yerkes' star still shines", by Chris Schultz, July 3, 2006.
  "In March, Yerkes confirmed the discovery of a supernova in a distant galaxy that's part of the Ursa Major constellation, also know as the Big Dipper...Now named Supernova 2006bg, the image was taken by Robert Holmes . . . Holmes sends his images to Yerkes for use in the Hands-On Universe program, an education program that gets raw astronomical data into the hands of high school science students.
 [Yerkes staff member Vivian Hoette] and others at Yerkes are working on blending research with hands-on-and eyes-on-education, so each new discovery may also create a new insight for students and teachers."

30 Jan 2005. New Focus for Yerkes
Excerpt: One outreach worker, Vivian Hoette, is involved with a group called Hands-On Universe.
    On a chilly moonlit night last year, Hoette hosted science teachers John Bruss from Deerfield High School in Illinois and Frank Mills from Palombi Middle School in Lake Villa, Ill.  They were using a smaller, 24-inch reflecting telescope at Yerkes to take pictures of galaxies and nebula and learn more about the science of astronomy.
    During the evening, Hoette's cell phone rang. Hughes Pack, a science teacher from Mount Herman boarding school in Northfield, Mass., asked her to photograph an asteroid while he conducted an evening astronomy class a thousand miles away.
    In less than half an hour, Hoette shot a multiple-picture sequence of the dim but fast-moving asteroid and uploaded the images to the Hands-On Universe Web site.
    Pack said his students love this type of lesson.  "This is real time.  Look what happens in 20 minutes.  The students really like to see things change and move."

March 2005. Small Telescope Parallax Group, which includes several HOU teacher leaders, looks for asteroids that come relatively close to Earth, whose parallax (and hence distance) can be determined by equipment available to amateur astronomers.  See results for asteroid 1998WT.
HOU collaborators in the Small Telescope Parallax Group: Vivian Hoette, Hands-On Universe;  Kaoru Kimura, Riken Institute of Japan;  Mike Ford, Elk Creek Observatory;  Lech Mankiewicz, Center for Theoretical Physics of Poland.

2004-2005. Congratulations to HOU teacher, Fred Page, for being named Secondary Teacher of the Year for Detroit Public Schools!

October 8, 2004. Science Magazine, Vol. 306, Issue 5694, 216-217.   Robotic Telescopes Give Kids a Cosmic Classroom.  HOU receives some nice publicity in this article on robotic telescopes.  Yerkes Observatory is mentioned, along with our rapidly evolving network of telescopes.  The article's main focus is on the Faulkes Telescopes, a set of two telescopes, one in Hawaii and one in Australia.  HOU teachers and collaborators have used the Faulkes on a limited basis already and hope to expand, somewhat, usage of these good instruments over the next few years.

March 11, 2004. Education Extra: Science classes looking up. By Walter Yost -- Sacramento Bee Bee Staff Writer. At the start of every astronomy class, [HOU TRA] Glenn Reagan's students scramble to computers to gaze at the latest breathtaking images from Mars: solar eclipses of the planet's two moons, the 100-mile-wide Gusev Crater, a dusty blue Martian sunset. "I've been teaching for 17 years, and nothing has been as interesting to students," said the Cordova High School instructor. ..."The photographs we're getting now are just beyond description," he said. Reagan expects Mars mania will carry over to upcoming space events, including June 4, when Venus crosses the sun, and July 1, when the Cassini spacecraft enters Saturn's orbit. "I think it's great that our generation will be the first to explore Mars," said Natasha Cabrera, a senior in Reagan's class. "If we find evidence of life on Mars, maybe we could find something about where we came from." ...Students like those in Reagan's class are also benefiting from impressive new technology, such as computerized astronomy. They're able to use image-processing software developed by "Hands-On Universe" at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley to request, receive and process their own astronomical images for projects like asteroid searches. In addition, they are communicating with other student astronomers via the Internet. Currently, Reagan's class is collaborating with peers at a North Carolina campus on a project measuring the mass of Saturn....

June 23-27, 2003 HOU Annual Conference 2003 was at Yerkes Observatory and Aurora College.

June 13-20, 2003. Wisconsin DPI Education Forum, Volume 6, Number 37. Students from WCBVI travel to Yerkes Observatory. Visit gives students and staff experience with equipment for SEE Project. Students and staff members from the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired (WCBVI) joined members of the Williams Bay Lions Club for the presentation of a special graphics printer and tour of the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay June 12. Summary article archived at http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/seachange/archive/0122.html

June 13, 2003. Janesville Gazette. Blind students use other senses to explore space. By Chris Schultz/Gazette Staff. WILLIAMS BAY- None of the students had been in an observatory before. It's a fair bet most have never seen starlight, either. Seven students from the Wisconsin Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Janesville visited the University of Chicago Yerkes Observatory on Thursday for a presentation, a tour and pizza-but also to experience a universe that most of us know nothing about.

May, 1999—HOU Receives $2.5 Million NSF Grant—The grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded to UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science - a national leader in creating science and math curricula for schools - will allow the HOU program to expand from 60,000 students today to an estimated 300,000 in five years. See UC Berkeley press release

1998—HOU teacher wins McAuliff award.

1998—HOU students discover a Kuiper Belt asteroid.

1997—HOU in a White House Press Release (1997)