REYNOLDS HIGH SCHOOL

Six young scholars from A.C. Reynolds High School in Buncombe County near Asheville, N.C. (A.C.R. HS  Website) visited PARI November 5, 2001. The group, plus three of their curious teachers are shown below.

These students and teachers are the first group to pre-beta test the School of Galactic Radio Astronomy learning experience. Below they are standing in front of the 4.6-m radio telescope while being shown Smiley's dish and feed.  !

The young scholars finally got down to business in the the PARI Control Center where they pointed  Smiley  at several bright radio sources. They compared the radio brightness of the Sun to Cassiopea A, a supernova remnant, and Cygnus A, a radio loud galaxy. They found both Cas A and Cyg A to be brighter than the Sun at 1420  MHz (21 cm) line of hydrogen.

If they had radio eyes,  they would be told not to look directly at the Sun and Cas A

In March 2002, seven students from the North Carolina School of Science and Math spent ten days at PARI.  Click on the image for more images.

The student projects included:

• Mapping the Galactic Center at 1420 MHz using the West 26 m radio telescope
• Mapping the entire Galactic Plane at 1420 MHz using the Smiley 4.6 m radio telescope
• Measuring the frequency dependence of quasar emission using the West 26-m radio telescope
• Measuring the pointing model for the East 26-m radio telescope
• Building a radio telescope from scratch

Charles Osborne, PARI Technical Director, teaches the students about antennae and receivers.

As an example of their work, the image below is the 1420 MHz Galactic Plane Map done by two of the NCSSM students who used Smiley.   The x-axis is Galactic Longitude, the Y-axis is Velocity, and the Z-axis is intensity. The brrightest spot is Cas A

Joshua Clark, from Freedom High School in Burke County, NC visited once a week from September 2001 through October 2001 to work on his Senior Project. His project was mapping the galactic plane at 1420 MHZ, with the intent of determining the velocity structure. This is similar to what the NCSSM students did, but Joshua used the West 26-m radio telescope instead of Smiley, and sampled at a higher spatial resolution at fewer points along the plane (30 arcminute resolution rather than 3 degree resolution used with Smiley). One of his raw data scans is shown below.  The x-axis is frequency and the y-axis is intensity. In this particular scan several velocity peaks are observed - a somewhat complicated structure often found in supernova remnants.

During the 3 months of his observations, he will only be able to cover about 90 degrees in Galactic  Longitude. The graph shown below is a plot of the velocities measured by Joshua versus distances  of the objects he meaasured. The  velocities have not been corrected for local motions, but nevertheless show the trend of increasing velocity away from the Galactic center.  The four data points with relatively low  velocities at large distances are reflection nebula (marked by arrows that are  located within a few hundred parsecs of the Sun.  So, we are seeing local motion in these  objects. The line represents the trend  towards higher velocities at increasing distances.