Expanding Opportunities: SARA and the Undergraduate Observer

2011

Chacon, Luis; Unzueta, Robert; Mercado, Juan Pablo; Vasquez, Victor; Donate, Saul; Angel, Ana; Rodriguez, Aloisses; Ponce, Felipe; Agredano, Ricardo; and Godinez, Deborah," Spring 2011 Newsletter"(2011). Xicana/o Graduate Council Newsletter. Paper 3.

There is growing documentation of the challenges women have faced and are facing in having an equal role in astronomy. At the same time, women are attaining important positions throughout the astronomical community, including the presidency of the International Astronomical Union and the American Astronomical Society. This means that excellent role models are now available to show girls that they can be an integral part of the human exploration of the universe. Many instructors of astronomy would like to present such role models during their class discussions, but don’t have the material to do so at hand or in their textbooks. Therefore, the Higher Education Working Group within NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has sponsored this guide to English-language materials. It is not meant to be a comprehensive introduction to this complex topic, but merely a resource for educators and their students on where to begin looking at the history, the biographical information, and the current i...

A National Clearinghouse for Higher Education Space and Earth Sciences, 2000

This guide to non-technical English-language materials is not meant to be a comprehensive or scholarly introduction to the complex topic of the role of women in astronomy. It is simply a resource for educators and students who wish to begin exploring the challenges and triumphs of women of the past and present. It's also an opportunity to get to know the lives and work of some of the key women who have overcome prejudice and exclusion to make significant contributions to our field. We only include a representative selection of living women astronomers about whom non-technical material at the level of beginning astronomy students is easily available. Lack of inclusion in this introductory list is not meant to suggest any less importance. We also don't include Wikipedia articles, although those are sometimes a good place for students to begin. Suggestions for additional non-technical listings are most welcome.

2016

We describe the remote facilities operated by the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA), a consortium of colleges and universities in the US partnered with Lowell Observatory, the Chilean National Telescope Allocation Committee, and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. SARA observatories comprise a 0.96m telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona; a 0.6m instrument on Cerro Tololo, Chile; and the 1m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain. All are operated using standard VNC or Radmin protocols communicating with on-site PCs. Remote operation offers considerable flexibility in scheduling, allowing long-term observational cadences difficult to achieve with classical observing at remote facilities, as well as obvious travel savings. Multiple observers at different locations can share a telescope for training, educational use, or collaborative research programs. Each telescope has a CCD system for optical imaging, using thermoelectric cool...

2012

Citizen Sky is a citizen science project organized by the AAVSO and supported by a 3-year National Science Foundation (NSF) ISE grant focusing on the variable star, epsilon Aurigae. The source epsilon Aurigae is ideal for this project because of the timing of its transit (coinciding with the International Year of Astronomy 2009), and the brightness of the source (allowing for naked eye observing). The overall goals of the project are to: help answer open questions about the epsilon Aurigae system, stimulate new interest in astronomy, allow citizen scientists to experience teamwork and scientific collaboration, and fully participate in the scientific method. The project and its web site provide ways for citizen scientists to practice observing variable sources, acquire and analyze data, and present results.

2019

Co-authors: Felix J. Lockman (GBO), Paul Goldsmith (JPL), Andrew I. Harris (Univ. of Maryland), Kieran A. Cleary (Caltech), Joshua O. Gundersen (Univ. of Miami), Laura Jensen (GBO), Alvaro Hacar (Leiden University), Che-Yu Chen (Univ. of Virginia), Will Armentrout (GBO), Natalie Butterfield (GBO), Larry Morgan (GBO), Amanda Kepley (NRAO), Jialu Li (Univ. of Maryland), Ian Stephens (CfA/SAO), Sarah Sadavoy (CfA/SAO), Kevin Harrington (Univ. of Bonn, AIfA), Jaime Pineda (Max-Planck), Zhi-Yun Li (Univ. of Virginia), Anthony Readhead (Caltech), Sarah Church (Stanford), Steven White (GBO), Randy McCullough (GBO), Galen Watts (GBO), Dennis Egan (GBO), Martin Bloss (GBO)

Journal of Astronomy & Earth Sciences Education (JAESE)

The nature of students’ ideas about the scientific practices used by astronomers when studying objects in our Solar System is of widespread interest to discipline-based astronomy education researchers. A sample of middle-school, high-school, and college students (N=42) in the U.S. were interviewed about how astronomers were able to learn about properties of the Solar System as a follow-up question after specific questions about the nature of the Solar System and its objects. These students often held naive ideas about the practices of astronomy, and 19% of them proposed that humans or robots have returned samples of the planets to Earth for analysis. While the college students provided more sophisticated responses to the questions than the younger students, we found that even they held naive ideas about human sample return and infrequently appealed to studying objects at a distance using telescopes. We propose that students are not receiving specific instruction that allows them...

1993

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Bill Gray of Project Pluto brought to our attention an error of 0.03°in the listed latitude of our Kitt Peak telescope. While correcting the table where this occurred, we also take the opportunity to update the instrument properties and weather statistics of our remote telescopes.