|
| 07/16/02
| |
Pennypacker Carlton |
UC Berkeley |
| Building 50, Room 5036 | Teacher-high-school |
|
94720 |
Berkeley, CA, USA |
Presentation 1 : Oral/Invited
Global-HOU Summary:
Slowly Building a Robust New Mechanisms for Learning and Science:
Over the past decade, as the ability to use professional
remote astronomy instruments has come to fruition, many teachers,
students, and professional astronomers are endeavoring to build a
Global Community pursuing the vision of shared resources and
explorations that can make huge differences in students and teachers
lives. We have found that over a 1000 teachers around the world want
to use data from HOU telescopes, share the data and their learning,
and advance themselves and their neighbors. All the while, they learn
the central math and science necessary to keep building a better
world. In many ways, this project has just scraped the surface of our
collabortaive abilities and interests -- the challenges ahead are
non-trivial, but they are also amenable to solutions of hardwork and
our team working together. Global HOU has made many gains, and is
poised to be a model of international cooperation and learning, and if
we succeed at the level we know we are capable of, we have much to
share with the rest of the global education community. In this talk I
will review some of the achievements Global HOU has undertaken, and
also note the challenges ahead.
Presentation 2 : Oral/Invited
US-HOU: proto-typing internet training of HOU teachers
HOU US continues to make slow but steady progress on a number of
fronts. Over 700 teachers in the US have been trained, and approximately
150 new teachers are trained every year, New software is slowly being
fixed, and old software is being de-bugged by a unique agreement with
French HOU. A telescope network is slowly evolving, and many images have
been delivered by Yerkes telescopes and staff. The efficacy of on-line
courses have been evaluated, and found that students of teadchers
educated in on-line courses do as well as teachers in face-to-face
teacher workshops. Many other adventures and plans are under
development, and HOU is partnering with a number of Space Missions.
Presentation 3 : Oral/Invited
Overview : Student Research, Lessons from the Past by Carl Pennypacker
Some HOU students have done amazing things -- two young women captured
the first light from a supernova -- SN 1984bi -- two other young women
discovered the 70th Kuiper Belt asteroid -- a little object a 100
kilometers acrossorbiting the sun beyond Neptune. Many students are
eager to undertake supernova research, or varaible star research, or
asteroid research, or many other types of important, engaging
astronomy research. I will address some of the potential of this
movement, and some pitfalls, and suggest some possible solutions.
Presentation 4 : Oral/Invited
The Narrabri Remote Telescope System for Planetaria and Museums
Through a new grant form the US National Foundation, a remote
telescope in Narrabri Australia, at the site of the Australian
National Telescope Facility, is under development. This telescope
will be remotely controlled from museums and planetaria in the
northern hemisphere, in daytime in the Western Hemisphere. We hope to
share this telescope and technology with other museums and planetaria.
Presentation 5 : Poster
RTML: A Protocol for Common
Interchange of Image Requests and Acquistions
We have
drafted a protocol for interchange of image requests over the
Internet, RTML, short for Remote Telescope Markup Language. RTML is a
subset of SML, or extensible mark up language. RTML is easily parsed
and used, and isolates the request from the telescope operating
system. Several telescopes use RRML already, adn more telescopes are
expected as our network grows.
Presentation 5 : Oral/Invited
Detecting Planets and Other Activities for Students with the Kepler Telescope Mission
The Kepler Mission is a CCD based imaging that will find many
planets by the decrease in flux from the star as the planet cocults the
disk of the parent star. It will satellite determine the frequency of
terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide
variety of spectral types of stars. It will also find the frequency of
planets is derived from the number and size of planets found and from the
number and spectral type of stars monitored. Even a null result would be
highly meaningful because of the large number of stars searched and the
low false alarm rate.
Kepler will also etermine the distributions of sizes and orbital
semi-major axes of these planets. The planet's area is found from the
fractional brightness decrease and the stellar area. For a detection with
a statistical significance of >8 sigma, the uncertainty of the planetary
area is about 14% and the planetary radius to 7%.
Kepler will estimate the frequency of planets and orbital distribution
of planets in multiple-stellar systems. This goal is achieved by
comparing the number of planetary systems found in single versus
multi-star systems. Multiple-stellar systems are identified from
ground-based spectroscopic measurements if they are tightly bound or from
high angular resolution observations if they are widely spaced systems.
Presentation 6 : Poster
Enhancing Teachers with Internet Video: Shasta to Berkeley to Chile!
Carl Pennypacker, Richard Lohman, r, Brain Griggsby, Rick
Fitzpatrick
In US-HOU, we have been developing a scalable system
to reach any interested teacher. Key to this is our on-line
course. Results from the on-line course will be described. A recent
exciting addition to the on-line courses have been teh addition of
video-conferencing and video streaming. We have been able to bring
these new video resources that use broad-band internet in a pilot
workshop for new HOU teachers held in Shasta County, California 200
miles (=320km) north of Berkeley. This session was archived on the
Internet, with a software system that allows teachers to search power
point documents for key words, and then scroll to the video where
these subjects are discussed. This system will be displayed at the
talk.