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Round 2 - IC 2118 Program News
Click on any teacher's name to see activities associated with NITARP.
- Tim Spuck (Oil City Area High School, Oil City, PA)
- Theresa Roelofsen (Bassick High School, Bridgeport, CT)
- Babs Sepulveda (Lincoln High School, Stockton, CA)
- Cynthia Weehler (Luther Burbank High School, San Antonio, TX)
- Tony Maranto (Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, NH)
Highlights of team activities
January 2008
Team members presented three posters at the January 2008 AAS meeting:
January 2007
The team presented two posters at the January 2007 AAS meeting entitled:
"Spitzer Observations of YSO's in the Witch Head Nebula (IC 2118)"
ADS Abstract
Poster
"Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students: Using Spitzer data in your classroom with (relatively) simple software"
ADS Abstract
Poster
Overall Science Goals
The IC2118 team is moving towards producing at least one professional journal article
on their studies of this region. The teachers are considering whether or
not to submit their own article to the RBSE journal at NOAO. In order to
do a complete analysis, the team has been working on obtaining additional data.
Spitzer is so sensitive that with just a few seconds of integration, they
can see things that are VERY far away. They can tell from Spitzer colors
that there are disks, but just can't tell if the disk is due to
circumstellar matter around a forming young star in the nebula they are
studying, or if the disk surrounds the nucleus of another galaxy (an AGN) at
a large redshift. By obtaining optical data, the team will be able to make a
better guess as to whether these things are young objects nearby, or
galaxies far away.
Observing Runs in 2006-2007
October 2006 through February 2007 dark time (new moon) - by working with
Frederick J. Vrba (USNO-Flagstaff Station), the IC2118 team has acquired UVRI imaging
of the entire region down to a depth comparable to most of the objects they
detected with IRAC.
They had about 5 weeks on the 1.0m telescope.
These data points will constrain the
short-wavelength end of the spectral energy distributions of the objects
detected with Spitzer. Luisa Rebull went along for a week in November,
but Fred Vrba did all of the rest of the observing.
January 2007 - 2 nights on Palomar 200" - low-resolution spectroscopy of
the optically brightest YSO candidates. The idea here is to get spectral
classifications (of YSOs) or identify an object as a quasar (if the Halpha
line is redshifted). Despite bad seeing, the team was able to obtain spectra
of several candidates. All of the objects they were able to observe
appeared to be stars (rather than quasars), but in many cases the low
signal-to-noise of the spectra means that the team might not be able to
do as much as they would have liked. Luisa Rebull, Varoujan Gorjian, and David M.
Cole along with four of the teachers (all of the active members of the team) went
along and worked together on various aspects of this larger project as
well as helped with the observing.
January 2007 - 2 half-nights on the KPNO 0.9m. Tim Spuck applied for and
got observing time through the RBSE program. He and several of his
students went to KPNO to do the observing. They acquired four fields near
the head of the nebula in Halpha. These observations will provide another
way of separating YSOs from QSOs in the data.
AAS (Jan 2007)
The team took two posters to the AAS - one on the new IC2118 Spitzer data (Tim
Spuck led this), and the other on educational materials that Theresa
Roelofsen(primarily) developed to enable people to measure photometry on Spitzer
images using MaxImDL. MaxImDL is a software package often used by amateur
astronomers and educators. It is expecting to see optical data, in units
of counts or brightness. Spitzer data are in *surface brightness*, which
is not the same thing. Conversions are required to convert the numbers
that MaxIMDL spits back into real, viable measurements. Theresa developed
the spreadsheet to do this, with input and feedback from the others.
The students that Tim Spuck brought along had a great time networking with the
astronomers at the meeting. Below are photos of the students explaining IC2118
poster to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Educational Materials and Resources
Russ Laher (SSC) has been working on developing a sophisticated Excel
spreadsheet that will enable a regular teacher to take a Spitzer-based
catalog (particularly the one associated with this project) and generate
SED plots and fits. He started working on this in Summer 2006 in
preparation for that year's teacher visit, and came along to Palomar in
January to work with the teachers. Everyone showed up at Palomar a night
early to acclimate to the night schedule, and pretty much that entire
first night was spent working on Russ's spreadsheet - working with what he
had, learning how to use it well, and giving him suggestions for the next
steps. Russ is thinking about writing up this spreadsheet for an
educational journal. The team is waiting on distributing this spreadsheet
until (a) it gets field tested by our teachers in their classrooms, and
(b) Russ decides whether he wants to write it up first. The time that the
teachers and Russ spent working on this at Palomar should greatly enable
part (a). Russ Laher and Luisa Rebull will work more on incorporating more
sophisticated science tools into this spreadsheet.
While at the AAS, the team decided/realized that they needed a Wiki, a place where
people could trade files and work on developing materials in a communal
fashion. In February 2007, Luisa Rebull was able to obtain wiki space on the
Community Affairs Team webserver, and the "cool wiki" is beginning to be
populated by materials that she developed for the teachers, and that the
teachers developed for the students. Quite a bit of information has been
ingested into it already, but Luisa would like to get more feedback from the
teachers on this team before sharing it with the rest of the teachers and
scientists from the Spitzer Teachers Research Program and then eventually
the public. She hopes to do this soon.
Theresa Roelofsen and Babs Sepulveda proposed to have a workshop at the NSTA in Spring 2008 to
share their Spitzer experiences. That's a working deadline to have a
really great wiki together.
Other Information
Tim Spuck visited the SSC for a month in July 2007.
Tim learned how to reduce the Spitzer data from scratch.
Tim has Linux machines that he
recently purchased and is setting up at Oil City. He's obtained IDL,
which will help him do professional data analysis regardless of whether he
starts with the optical or the Spitzer data. Tim worked this
summer also to improve the team's educational resource legacy in the
form of our Cool Wiki.
Tim Spuck won an award in December 2007 from AIAA. He obtained local media
coverage for his and his students' trip to KPNO.
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