Articles

  • Harlan Devore:
    • July 11, 2005. Teachers and Students Visit Spitzer Science Center. by Linda Vu, Spitzer Science Center. Smiling, Spitzer Staff Scientist Dr. Ranga-Ram Chary silently watched as 17-year old Katie Mills explained a complex plot of spikes and dips to Pasadena Star News reporter Kimm Groshong. Ironically, just two days before this interview, upon her arrival at the Spitzer Science Center (SSC), the North Carolina teen worried that she wasn’t “smart enough to do Dr. Chary’s job.” Mills was one of seven SSC guests, visiting the week of June 27. The group of three science teachers and four students are participants of the Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students, which granted 12 educators the use of three and a half hours of Spitzer observing time for educational observations. …Under the guidance of Dr. Chary, Cape Fear High School Astronomy Teacher and project team leader Harlan Devore proposed using Spitzer’s Infrared Spectrometer to study the geometry, composition, and physical properties of dust surrounding the supermassive black hole in Arp102B, a galaxy located in the constellation Hercules. “Because we can’t actually see inside the black hole, we hope to learn more about its energy source by studying the dust that is about to go inside it,” said Devore. “We [students] want to learn all we can learn from this experience,” added Mills. …the teachers were originally only given two hours of Spitzer observation time. However, because SSC Director Dr. Thomas Soifer found the proposals so impressive upon review, all six projects were accepted and the observation time was extended to three and a half hours. … astronomy teacher Devore,… will use Spitzer’s data in his “universe analysis” unit, which includes identifying stars based on absorption lines in their spectra. According to Devore, this visit to the SSC marks just the beginning of the data analysis process. “We will be analyzing this data for a good part of the next school year,” said Devore.
    • Aug 15, 2003. Best Paper. I got a nice surprise yesterday when I read the minutes of the March 2003 minutes of NC Section of the American Assoc. of Physics Teachers. One of my students (Ji-Seon Park) and I had attended the meeting and she had presented her paper on "Orbital Properties of Saturn’s Moons". We had left after her presentation and did not stay around for the business meeting. She was competing in the Undergraduate papers category, and we really didn’t think we had much chance against the college papers. I was surprised, then when I read in the meeting minutes this notice: "Results of the voting for Best Papers: Undergraduate, Ji-Seon Park of Cape Fear high School for "Orbital Properties of Saturn’s Moons" and Pedagogical, Michael Paesler of North Carolina State University for "Anemochoric Palynomorphic Investigations of Paleoatmospheres: Using the physics of the movement of fossil spores in wind to study the history of the Earth’s atmosphere." Another success story for HOU.

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  • Jan Engsedt: Aug 11, 2003. Some articles written by, a very talent Danish
    teachers I met some years ago, Mogens Winther: Mass of Saturn — The first relates to the mass of Saturn taking in account the shadow on the rings of Saturn. Look at http://www.amtsgym-sdbg.dk/as/AOL-SAT/SATURN.HTM. Distance to Venus — combining simple visible observations with geometrical calculations. …
    Mogens is active in the European organisation EAAE, European Assosiation for Astronomy Education.

  • Jeff Adkins:
    • Spring, 2006. Jeff Adkins and students in the Antioch ESPACE Academy at Deer Valley High School (DVHS) have been involved in a project sponsored by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) to observe Active Galactic Nuclei on the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope as well as ground based observations. Students are involved in these observations and data reductions. The first round of the project is complete and results were presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC in January 2006. The results are online at http://www.spaceacademy.jhuapl.edu/ (click on the Spitzer Space Telescope picture). They have been approved for another observation of a different AGN on the Global Telescope Network list maintained by Dr. Spear at Sonoma State University. They are welcoming amateur and professional observations of this target using BVRI filters or radio telescopes, to accompany their own observations of the target using school telescopes and remote control telescopes. Contact Jeff Adkins <astronomyteacher[at]mac.com>
      Also DVHA students did pretty well at their county science fair. They won every award in our division except 1st place, took all 5 scholarships offered to students from Chevron (a total of $2500 distributed among 5 students), 3 awards from the local astronomical society, and got several other awards as well. Many thanks to all of the programs from NOAO, the Spitzer Science Center, HOU, and elsewhere that allowed our students to succeed. See the ESPACE press release page: homepage.mac.com/dvhscience/SpaceAcademy/press.html
    • Fall 2004. Jeff, HOU Teacher at Deer Valley HS in Antioch, CA, provides interesting details on his experience converting FITS images from professional-grade CCD cameras to FITS images that can be opened by the HOU Image Processing program. His experience is from work in the Teacher Leaders in Research Based Science Education (TLRBSE). This article is of special interest to Mac users. The article is at:
      homepage.mac.com/dvhscience/SpaceAcademy/Projects/iraf.html
    • Oct 25, 2003. Build your own planetarium out of cardboard. We have established
      a web site http://www.cccoe.net/stars which explains
      how to build a planetarium out of cardboard. Our dome uses a geodesic design, and we have built one and tested it with a starlab projector. The site also includes plans for a projector, but those haven’t been tested yet (we have some students working on it now). Feedback is welcome, especially photos if you build one of the domes and tell us how it went, if the site instructions need editing, etc. The site was funded with a small grant from the Dean and Margaret Lesher foundation administered through the Contra Costa County (CA) Office of Education. We will be at NSTA and will present this site as a session along with a description of our space academy.
    • Sep 2, 2003. Webcam Mars image. This is the best image of Mars I’ve taken. It was taken on Friday, August 29 at about 1 AM Pacific. The camera was originally based on a Quickcam Express, but since that is a PC-only camera, I removed the guts and replaced them with the parts from a QuickCam 3000 (www.logitech.com), which is cross platform. The camera mount consists basically of a small black project box with a 1 1/4" outside diameter tube attached to a hole in the box; the CCD chip lies in the bottom of the hole, surrounded by black electrical tape to absorb stray light. The telescope I and a couple of friends, Ray Kuntz and Eric Chamberlain, used was a 10" Meade SCT, specifically an LX200 GPS, which is pretty fun to use. This telescope aligns itself, or nearly so. All you have to do is verify a couple of stars and presto, you’re in business. Basically I centered Mars, then moved the image down in the field of view until it matched the relative position of the CCD in the tube, popped out the eyepiece, put in the camera, refocused, and started recording. There was a 2x barlow in the light path for this image.

      Using IOxperts’ Quickcam driver (http://www.ioxperts.com) and BTV’s image capture program (http://bensoftware.com) I make short Quicktime movies in real time of the Red Planet. Above is a sample frame from that movie. When doing this sort of observing, it is important to save your work frequently. Finally, using a program called Keith’s Image Stacker, I selected about 20 of the best frames from the movie, then nudged them around so they were lined up nearly in the same position. Then the software added the images together and produced a raw image not too different from the picture above. Watching the resulting video is very similar to looking directly through the eyepiece yourself. Keith’s Image Stacker does all the thing one learns about in a course in astronomy on CCD’s: dark frames, bias, etc.
      I intend to register all the the shareware mentioned above soon, so I can run longer sessions without being interrupted by shareware notices.

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  • Kevin McCarron: 1999. conducted a small education research study “Testing Actual Astronomy With Students” to see if doing real astronomy improves students’ understanding of color. This year the students used the techniques astronomers use to find the star color, a la HOU activity in Measuring Color to determine the color and temperature of four stars. He compared exam results from previous years to this year to test improvements in student’s understanding of light and color.
  • Lech Mankiewicz: Sep 2, 2003. Sun In Radiowaves. Dear Friends, One of our kids, Michal Wrochna from XIV Staszic High School in Warsaw (one of our schools which particpate in HOU) has captured image of the Sun in radio waves: http://www.cft.edu.pl/~lech/HOU/radio_sun_1.gif< using very simple equipment: parabolic satellite TV antena, 60 cm diameter, LNB converter, Signal detector, such as used by people coming to install the antena on your roof. It is available for about $50 in Poland. At x-axis you have arc-minutes, on y-axes signal level. The observation was made in a drift-scan mode, i.e. with fixed antenna and the Earth moving around.
  • Michael Hibbs: April 1-2, 2004. Tarleton hosts joint meeting of American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), American Physical Society (APS) and the Society of Physics Students. Tarleton is hosting the joint meeting of the Texas sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), American Physical Society (APS) and the Society of Physics Students. There will also be a section for high school teachers and students. Tarleton-trained HOU teachers are invited to attend the Astronomy Education section and present a short presentation (5 minutes) on your experience and application of the Hands-On Universe. The meeting for astronomy will be Friday, April 2 from 11:15 am to 12:30 pm. Before you speak, I will give an overview of the program. I am sure I can get you at least a free lunch and/or dinner. You can also claim that you have presented a paper at a professional society conference (hopefully that will help in future merit reviews). Michael Hibbs. 254-968-9150. hibbs{at}tarleton.edu
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