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Round 2 Programs
We advertised Round 2 of the Spitzer teacher's program
to teachers on a national level in early Autumn 2005 and by the end of October we selected the teachers for
the program. Of the 17 applications received, we chose 6 teachers. The selection was made with special attention to the teacher's education
background and experience.
The 6 teachers will all be working on a Spitzer observing program which will involve the study star formation
rates in three high redshift galaxy clusters.
At the January, 2006 AAS meeting, the new teachers met with
with Round 1 teachers and learned about the six observed Round 1 programs.
They received training in Infrared Astronomy and learned about
the Spitzer Space Telescope, its instruments
and the observation planning process.
In addition to this new Spitzer program, three teams of teachers from Round 1 were awarded additional observing time to
expand on successful work done on their Round 1 programs. The IC 2118 team studied star formation in the Witch Head Nebula
in the constellation Orion. They observed the head of the nebula and approximately quadrupled the number of young stars known there!
Now, they will continue their investigation by observing the densest part of the rest of the cloud.
Last year the GLAST team, studied the AGN 4C 29.45 with the Spitzer MIPS and the IRAC instruments as well as ground based
instruments. These observations were used to determine the object's Spectral Energy Distribution (SED), which was compared
to a model of disk emission in order to determine if there was a component of the SED due to synchrotron radiation induced
by the jets. In Round 2 they will observe another AGN and expand their efforts to create simultaneous observations through radio
telescopes, optical telescopes, and other instruments.
The Brown Dwarf team searched for low mass, cool, brown dwarfs in short orbital period interacting white dwarf binaries. They
detected excess emission in the 3-8 micron region over that expected from a brown dwarf alone in four binary systems. They
also found, usung IRAC observations, that the star EF Eri was unexpectedly bright in the mid-IR. Now the team will
observe EF Eri with the IRS instument to learn more about this star.
The Round 2 teams have been paired with scientists from the
SSC community with help and collaboration from NOAO scientists. The scientists are the mentors and technical contacts for the individual
groups and respective observing project. For Round 2, four of our teacher proposals have been accepted and submitted for observations.
The participating teachers in Round 2 are: Jeff Adkins, John Blackwell,
Howard Chun, Velvet Dowdy, Rosa Hemphill, Ardis Herrold, Thomas Loughran,
Anthony Maranto, Steve Rapp, Theresa Roelofsen,
Babs Sepulveda, Linda Stefaniak, Timothy Spuck, Dwight Taylor, Beth Thomas, and
Cynthia Weehler. Support scientists include:
Ranga-Ram Chary,
Vandana Desai,
John Feldmeier,
Rose Finn,
Varoujan Gorjian,
Don Hoard,
Steve Howell,
Mark Lacy,
Luisa M. Rebull
and Gregory Rudnick.
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