Hands-On Universe Annual Meeting 2009 for Teachers and Teacher Resource Agents (TRAs)
at Yerkes Observatory
Announcement and Agenda
TUESDAY 2009 June 23 MORNING
- 9:30 AM New Developments on US HOU - Carl Pennypacker - 20 min - HOU has endeavored to respond to the shifts in national priorities and opportunities in education, and is finding good partners and ways to grow and improve. Some of the improvements and partners will be described.
- 9:50 AM Assessing Methods of Instruction of Solar System Concepts - Michael C. LoPresto, Henry Ford Community College, Dearborn MI, working with Carl Pennypacker through James Cook University 30-40 min - A review of the development and assessment of Lecture Tutorials on various solar system concepts. PDF of Reserach Article about Colour Mathematics.
- 10:45 Overview of WISE-HOU activities ready for field test
Here is the URL for HOU-WISE workgroup area
http://www.handsonuniverse.org/hs/wise/ which
has collected documents. Janet Ward, Broad Run HS, VA and Alan Gould, Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley. Summary of activities for HOU Asteroid Research.
TUESDAY 2009 June 23 AFTERNOON
1:20 IASC: Scalability & Growth in Student Discovery Programs - Patrick Miller. About automation of image preps for the asteroid search campaigns leading to the scalability and growth of IASC to 150 schools.
Also, new collaborations and partnerships have expanded IASC reach into a global network of high schools and colleges.
- 2:00 Planning HOU-WISE workshops for field test teachers. Alan Gould facilitating.
- 3:00 Making an Asteroid Movie using Windows Movie Maker. Tim Spuck, Oil City High School, PA
- 3:30 Seeing Binary -- HOU Binary Star Research. Roy Morris 40 min, Planetarium Director, Columbia Public Schools, Rock Bridge High School, Columbia, MO 65203-7198 573-214-3148
- 4:15 SOFIA Outreach and YAAYS Project. Ed Sadler, Vivian Hoette, Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, WI. Using an infrared light source, trace the light path through concave and convex lenses. This lab is designed for sighted and blind students, hearing and deaf students. Use tactile methods for recording ray paths. Directions for building the components will be provided.
Tuesday Evening
- HOU-WISE: Set agenda for 1- or 2-day workshop with follow-up telecon/Internet sessions.
- Imaging with the 24 inch. Here is a link to the images.
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WEDNESDAY 2009 June 24 MORNING
- 9:00 AM Global HOU and the Galileo Teacher Training Project - Carl Pennypacker - 20 min -HOU is expanding to more nations eager to use HOU, and new nations are joining us. Specifically, teacher training workshops have been held at a number of nations, and will greatly increase the number of HOU teachers, students, collaborating scientists, and others around the world.
- 9:20 AM Over-The-Hill Observatory, Phase II. Rich Lohman, Retired teacher and Educational Consultant for HOU, Woodacre, CA (site of Over-The-Hill Observatory). Progress since last year on my observatory—the final product and issues in construction and in actually using the system.
- 9:50 "WISE and Asteroids." Bryan Mendez, Space Science Lab, WISE Mission EPO, UC Berkeley.
- 10:20 AM --- Telescope Network Developments
- 10:45 AM A Changing Cosmos, Global Systems Science, and HOU IP 2.0 - Alan Gould - 30 min.
- 11:15 AM Salsa & Chips: Simple Astrophotography with SalsaJ. Glenn Reagan, Cordova High School in Rancho Cordova, CA
WEDNESDAY 23 June 2008 AFTERNOON
- 1:20 How Dark is Your Sky? Local Solutions to a Global Challenge - Robert Sparks (on behalf of Connie Walker), NOAO. IYA Dark Skies Awareness programs, the star-hunting programs that are part of the IYA DSA cornerstone, like GLOBE at Night 2010.
- 2:00 HOU IP 2.0 and SalsaJ Image Processing workshop. Alan Gould facilitating. Link to download and review HOU-IP 2.0. New Version of HOU-IP 2.0 for Mac. Staying up to date.
- 2:20 Galileoscope - Robert Sparks, NOAO.
- 3:15 Elementary Lesson for WISE. Jenifer Perazzo, UC Berkeley and Space Science Lab
- Darrel Harvey: HOU Success Story
- 7:45 PM Using Stellarium, the open-source planetarium program. Rich Lohman, Retired teacher and Educational Consultant for HOU, Woodacre, CA. We recommend attendees download and install this on their computers ahead of time. This will not to be just a demonstration. Download from http://www.stellarium.org
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THURSDAY 2009 June 25 MORNING
- 9:00 AM Measuring the Age of the Universe from your Classroom with Sloan Digital Sky Survey Supernovae - Carl - Curricula in pilot that uses Sloan supernovae to enable students to estimate the age and size of the Universe"
- 9:20 AM Spitzer and Beyond: the The NASA IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP) (and how you can apply!) - Dr. Luisa Rebull, Spitzer Science Center, Caltech/JPL, Pasadena, CA - The program formerly known as the Spitzer Research Program for Teachers has been expanded to include the use of NASA archives, and is now named the NASA IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP Application ). NITARP is a program partnering teams of teachers with a mentor scientist to do research with NASA archives; we're soliciting applications for teachers to conduct research with a teacher team and a mentor scientist. There is also a Cool Wiki with lots of information about using Spitzer data.
- YSOVAR - Dr. Luisa Rebull (from follow up email notes)
- YSOVAR studies the variability of young stellar objects (YSOs). YSOs are known to vary at shorter bands; a small pilot project showed that they do very interesting things at the Spitzer wavelengths as well.
- We can learn a lot from monitoring at just the two IRAC bands, but we can learn even more if we have some simultaneous ground-based observations.
The hitch is that we won't know exactly when our observations are scheduled until about ~6 weeks beforehand. It's hard to make this work out for professional telescopes ... but this is exactly the right project for small telescopes, preferably those remotely operated! - Attached is a PDF version of a talk given at the last AAS meeting which has an overview of YSOVAR. Our website is http://ysovar.ipac.caltech.edu. We're likely to start getting observations in ~6 weeks or so, maybe a little more.
- PLEASE NOTE that this is a REAL RESEARCH program, e.g., you'll be treated like all the other professional collaborators -- this isn't part of NITARP, there isn't a lot of background information already developed, there isn't a reference I can point you to that isn't a professional research journal article, so you sort of have to walk into this unafraid and willing to get going on your own. But it is exciting! :) :) There is some relevant information on the NITARP wiki, just not particularly optimized for YSOVAR.
- 10:45 Update on NASA Kepler EPO: Animations, Podcasts and Movies; Transit Tracks; Exoplanet Transit Hunt simulation. Alan Gould
- 11:20 Planet X to Z Unwrapping the Solar System, using the Night Sky Network's Worlds of the Solar System: Make a Scale Model. Jeremy Amarant, SAGE Planetarium, Palmdale School District. Fact Sheet. We will use manipulatives to demonstrate the Distance, Size and Mass of the Solar System in 1 hour or less.
THURSDAY 2009 June 25 AFTERNOON
- 1:20 Astronomy Outreach using Python. Marc Berthoud, Vivian Hoette, Yerkes Observatory. Python is an easy to learn new open-source multi-platform programming language. At Yerkes we have developed a set of programming activities related to astronomy and FITS image analysis.
We conducted several of these activities with teachers and students grades 5th and higher, with instructions on the outreach twiki (YaaysVisitor / yaays2008). - 2:00 The HOU Universe Quest program. Carl Pennypacker, Rich Lohman.
- 2:30 Eyepieces only a bird would love: Cheap Cheap Cheap. Making your own eyepieces from lens sets. Kevin McCarron, Oak Park and River Forest High School, Illinois
- 3:00 HOU freebie: Teleslin access to Perth telescope.
- 3:45 NEO Discoveries & Astro Research at TJ High. Lee Ann Hennig, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA
- Image with Tzec Maun Project with Glenn Reagan.
FRIDAY 2009 June 26 MORNING
- 9:00 AM TBA. Gloria Villalobos
- 9:45 AM TBA. Mike Ford, Elk Creek Observatory, Holton, KS
- 10:00 AM Jupiter's Mass for Everyone, Rigorous enough for HS, and understandable enough for MS. Peggy Piper and Vivian Hoette, Yerkes Observatory. Includes a variety of image sets, ppt for deriving equations, and an excel template for boiling down the calculations so you just need to put in the radius and period in meters and seconds to find the mass. Link to image set jup-io-welong020122-9hrs, and other Jupiter Image Sets.
- 10:45 Planning for next year's conference.