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PARI’s STARLAB planetarium is used for school programs as well as for the public, teacher workshops, camps and other special venues. Most school programs aredesigned tosupport the North and South Carolina curricula at the appropriate grade levels. Others serve as introductions to the current night sky and could be scheduled more than once in different seasons. All programs are presented by by Dr. Bob Hayward, STARLAB coordinator . More than 20,000 people have enjoyed PARI STARLAB presentations by Dr. Bob.
School of Galactic Radio Astronomy
The School of Galactic Radio Astronomy (SGRA) was developed with support from the STScI IDEAS program to offer students in grades 8-12 a unique, live, hands-on, inquiry based approach to learning through Internet control of a 4.6 meter radio telescope (nicknamed Smiley) located at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI). The radio telescope is designed to detect 21-cm radio waves emitted by the center of our galaxy and its spiral arms, supernova remnants, regions of star formation and other celestial sources. Students and teachers make the decisions: from source selection, to pointing the telescope, to taking the measurements.
Presently, SGRA has been incorporated by about 100 teachers into school systems in the Southeast U.S. serving more than 3,000 students. Teachers attend workshops on the PARI campus where they learn to use the radio telescope and accompanying lesson modules. Teachers use the telescope and modules in classes where students can access, control, and watch Smiley through the Internet, providing them with real time and real life experiences.
PARI is committed to making the radio telescope available to schools over the Internet and providing up to 20% of their astronomers time to the project. PARI's SGRA is partially supported by Progress Energy ($15,000).
Duke Talent Identification Program
The Duke University Talent Identification Program (TIP) held its Summer Field Study in Astronomy at PARI from June 13-26, 2004. Twenty-one talented and gifted high school students studied and did research projects using the radio and optical telescopes at PARI. Instructors for the TIP Summer Field Study in Astronomy are TIP employees. PARI staff provide support for use of the PARI telescopes.
PARI was awarded grant funding from Janirve Foundation to support an internet, interactive science program for K-12 students. Our project began in July 2003 for a one year period. Initial preparation included organizing a team of teachers, computer graphics and software technicians to create “The Science Zone” interactive learning lab to supplement science instruction for all grades. The program will consist of a series of hands-on experiments that students and teachers can conduct from school or at home.
SPACE Observatory is a remote controlled telescope and astronomical camera. Funded primarily by the Friends of PARI, the telescope is meant to be used on a subscription basis. By December 2003, the structure (supplied by PARI) and telescope had been installed and initial shakedown of the system begun.
Teacher Workshops/Public Outreach
Student Teachers from the Morehead Planetarium at UNC-Chapel Hill spent a weekend at PARI learning how to use the 4.6-m “Smiley” radio telescope. Smiley is designed for use over the Internet in high schools.
Morehead Planetarium and Science Center (MPSC) Outreach Educator, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Physics and Astronomy, and PARI were awarded a NASA Space Telescope Science Institute IDEAS Program, “Observation Based Student Experience in Research Via Exploration (OBSERVE)”for $49,949 March 2003. PARI’s commitment to the project will be allocation of space on the PARI Optical Ridge for one of the robotic telescopes, as well as periodic maintenance.
PARI celebrated our fifth Space Day 2004 with an open house on May 8, 2004. Four hundred visitors enjoyed hot air balloon rides, STARLAB planetarium shows, viewing the Sun through specially designed solar telescopes, talking to the PARI staff, and seeing the PARI Observatories Control Center.
Denise Young, Morehead Planetarium, is lead investigator on a grant from the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute IDEAS Program. PARI is a co-investigator. The grant is to support the development of the UNC-Chapel Hill Gamma Ray Observatory at PARI into a resources for teachers. The observatory will be used by teachers remotely from their schools, much as the PARI School of Galactic Radio Astronomy 4.6-m radio telescope is used. The first group of teachers will spend two weeks at PARI in July 2005.
NSF IPSE Grant: Sensing the Radio Universe
PARI was awarded a two year grant from the National Science Foundation, Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences Internships in Public Science Education Program (IPSE). The grant begins in January 2004 and will support up to 12 undergraduates and 4 professors from UNC-Asheville, Furman and PARI. The project description summary is:
The general public’s experience with the universe is often limited in space and time, due mainly to general education and popular literature. The observable universe beyond the thin slice of the visible spectrum is often overlooked. Strikingly, newspapers and magazines, television and radio, and the internet, broadcast almost daily news about discoveries in astronomy that have been made at radio, millimeter, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths. How can the public relate to these discoveries? And, how is the public expected to be excited enough about these discoveries to support further research if their understanding is limited to the visible universe?
The proposed project will develop a new portable planetarium program that will immerse the audience in the radio universe to give them first hand experience with a part of the electromagnetic spectrum they might not otherwise ever be aware of. The program will employ a radio view of the sky projected on the portable planetarium dome, and an accessory projector simulating a pulsar by flashing light, sound, and touch through beepers that the audience will be given. The program will be accompanied by a multimedia presentation that can be used beforehand in a lecture or class situation, or used in the portable planetarium itself. The multimedia presentation will also be available on a website.
The development of the radio sky program requires the synergistic efforts of individuals with a broad range of talents from physics to electronics, from art and computer graphics to education. A team of undergraduate multimedia and physics majors is ideal to meet this need. Students are not bound by convention; they create what we don’t imagine. Still in transition between a general education in high school and development of professional skills, undergraduates can still view science from the perspective of the general public, but with the newly acquired knowledge from college. The teams of students participating in the project will develop and build a projection cylinder for the portable planetarium that projects the view of the universe as seen at radio wavelengths, i.e., the radio sky. The students will also develop and build the pulsar projector accessory for the cylinder. The key to the use of the new projector will be the student developed multimedia program which will describe the radio sky.
The educational experience in research and communication of that research will be of great value to the students. Their experience will impact in a positive light their success in post-undergraduate education and future employment. Over a two-year period the proposed project will involve 12 students who will work with a professional planetarium operator, two professional astronomers, and a multimedia expert with planetarium experience. The intellectual merit of the proposed project unites students from different fields to bring a new view of the universe to the public.
The radio sky project developed with funding through the MPS-IPSE will have a large national and international impact. The programs the student teams develop will immediately impact the western North Carolina region where more than 50,000 students and general public will be visited with the portable planetarium in classrooms and public open houses. On a broader scale, portable planetariums have been sold in over forty-five countries around the world with an estimated 12 million individuals participating in portable planetarium programs each year. The proposed project has the potential to reach these individuals.
HST Education/Public Outreach Program
PARI was awarded a grant from the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Education/Public Outreach program. This program is eligible to astronomers who have observing time with the HST. Dr. Castelaz at PARI has such time, and so we are eligible for the award. The grant is being used to develop new curricula for SGRA, and includes software development, plus web-based curricular materials.
PARI and the University of North Carolina (UNC) system are working together to establish the Pisgah Astronomical Research and Science Education Center (PARSEC) as a Research Center of the University of North Carolina system with UNC-Asheville being the Administrative Institution. We envision that PARSEC alongside PARI will become a national leading observatory and study site, providing a broad cross-section of users with direct research and education access to radio and optical astronomy.
UNC-Chapel Hill Gamma Ray Burst Optical Afterglow
UNC-Chapel Hill graduates student Melissa Nysewander, is developing a robotic telescope system on the PARI Optical Ridge. The telescope will automatically point at astronomical events. She is expected to have the observatory operating by Summer 2004.
PARI received a $2,510 grant from the Theodore Dunham, Jr. Grants for Research in Astronomy. This is part of Radio Telescope Research. The grant was used to by equipment to monitor the temperature of several components of the receiver on the PARI West 26-m radio telescope. The temperatures will be fed back to a computer controllable attenuator to help stabilize the detected signals. All observation programs at PARI using the 26-m radio telescope require a stable receiver, and this grant will help PARI achieve that goal. Matt Hoyle, an undergraduate at UNC-Asheville worked on the project with PARI staff.
Michaela Logue, a Senior Physics major at UNC-Asheville made observations of Alpha Ursa Minoris (more commonly known as Polaris). Polaris is a known variable star that brightens and dims every 3.97 days because the star itself is pulsating! The variation is very peculiar, however. Since 1945, the rate of period increase and amplitude decrease has been changing. Michaela worked with us on the development of the observatory and data reduction techniques for a new multi-year optical observational study of Polaris. The Polaris telescope is a very exciting addition by being a major contributor to the study of Polaris with continuous live images on the PARI website.
Dr. David Moffett, an astronomer from Furman University, is developing a 327 MHz receiver on the PARI 26 meter East radio telescope. Dr. Moffett’s receiver will measure the radio signals from the central stars of supernova remnants.
M. W. Castelaz (Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute) and B. McCollum (SIRTF Science Center, Caltech) will study the 6th-magnitude B2IV-V star HD 6226 which was discovered a few years ago on the basis of Hipparcos photometry to be variable, and possibly periodic, by Bozic and Harmanec (1998). Bozic and Harmanec suggested that HD 6226 could be a previously unrecognized Be star based on some episodes of brightening which were accompanied by reddenings in B-V and blueings in U-B. McCollum, Castelaz, and Caton (2000) first reported detection of H-alpha emission from HD 6226, and confirmed that it is a previously unknown Be star.
HST Observations: Study of Young Stellar Objects
Hubble Space Telescope observations come to PARI! Michael Castelaz (PARI), along with Bruce McCollum at the Space Infrared Telescope Facility Center at the California Institute of Technology, Alfred Schultz at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Malcolm Niedner at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and Fred Bruhweiler at the Catholic University of America, have been awarded observing time with the HST Cycle 12 over the coming year. They will be the first to study the nature of a unique set of stars in the Orion Nebula.
Presentations at American Astronomical Society Meetings
2003 American Astronomical Society Presentations: Two papers were presented at the Winter 2003 American Astronomical Society Meeting January 6-10, 2003. One was called “Student Programs and Research at PARI”, the other “Atmospheric Seeing and Transparency Robotic Observatory.” Three papers were presented at Summer American Astronomical Society's (AAS) meeting May 25 & 29 in Nashville, TN by PARI Researchers. The papers are: “The Be Star HD 6226”, “A New Program of Multi-Year Continuous Phase Coverage Photometry of Alpha UMi”, and “Astronomical Photographic Plate Preservation.”
A new initiative at PARI is the North American Center of Astronomical Plates (NACAP) - an archival and digitization center of astronomical photographic plates. One hundred and thirty years of astrophysics exists only on those plates, which were the primary data recording medium for many generations of astronomers. The data is precious, and we cannot go back in time to image the sky as it appeared to such famous astronomers as Hubble. We are working with Dr. Elizabeth Griffin from the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, Canada. She is the Chair of the International Astronomical Union Working Group on Astronomical Photographic Plate Preservation. The archive will prove to be a resource harnessed by generations of astronomers. Dr. Griffin, and her team, have been searching for a home for the plate preservation project. PARI is a natural home, providing space, infrastructure, and Internet access. Along with Dr. Griffin and the DAO, PARI will be co-hosting a Special Session entitled "Archiving and Digitization of Photographic Plates" at the 203rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society to be held in Atlanta in January 2004. We look forward to CAP and the legacy that PARI will develop as a vital archival resource for future research projects.
Variable Stars in Old Open Clusters
Open clusters are important for understanding the evolution of the Milky Way galaxy because their distances, compositions and ages may be determined. Binary and variable stars in open clusters are particularly important because they may be formed by dynamical processes inside the clusters, or may offer insight into specific stages of stellar evolution in a given cluster. Double-lined, spectroscopic eclipsing binaries can provide independent distance determinations to the clusters they inhabit. At PARI we are beginning several searches for binary stars in old and intermediate age open clusters. We will use them to measure the distances to their parent clusters. Several important old open clusters (M67, Praesepe and NGC752) also contain binary stars. Understanding the period changes in these objects will offer insights into evolution of contact binaries. Small optical telescopes are well-suited for the research. PARI host to two 0.25m telescopes and a 12 inch telescope. A 0.35m telescope will soon be available and two 0.5m telescopes and a 1.2m telescope are part of the PARI Five Year Development Plan. The principle investigator of this research is Dr. Blake, PARI resident staff astronomer, who is an expert in variable stars in old and intermediate age open clusters.
PARI will host professional astronoym workshops. Two workshops that have been held at PARI are ‘’Small Radio Telescopes in Modern Astronomy’’ and ‘’Gamma Ray Bursts’’