Skynet

11/06/2024

Congratulations to Christopher Ward for completing Skynet University's "Astronomy with Skynet: Our Place in Space!" course!
This course:
http://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/ourplaceinspace/
and others:
http://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/thesolarsystem/
http://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/starsgalaxiesandcosmology/
are open to anyone who has a passion for astronomy and are up for a challenge! They are inexpensive, self-paced, for-certificate versions of the introductory astronomy courses that we teach at the University of North Carolina.
And admission is rolling, so sign up any time!

11/06/2024

Congratulations to Christopher Ward for completing Skynet University's "Astronomy 101: The Solar System" course!
This course:
http://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/thesolarsystem/
and others:
http://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/ourplaceinspace/
http://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/starsgalaxiesandcosmology/
are open to anyone who has a passion for astronomy and are up for a challenge! They are inexpensive, self-paced, for-certificate versions of the introductory astronomy courses that we teach at the University of North Carolina.
And admission is rolling, so sign up any time!

09/16/2024

Great thanks to everyone who nominated me, and to the scores of educators who have invested sometimes years of their lives contributing to my various astronomy education passion projects, ERIRA, OPIS!, and MWU!.

Added to our list of honors in 2006, the Richard H. Emmons Award was inspired by a very generous gift from Jeanne and Allan Bishop, in honor of her father, Richard Emmons. Dr. Jeanne Bishop, a well-known astronomy educator in her own right, wished to honor her father, an astronomer with a lifelong d...

07/02/2024

Want to learn some radio astronomy? Want your students to learn some radio astronomy? Want your students to DO some radio astronomy, in your intro classes?

Here's a workshop I gave at AstroEdUNC last month, on Doppler spectroscopy and imaging of nearby, edge-on, spiral galaxies.

During the workshop, we measure Hubble's constant, and the masses of galaxies. We also visualize Andromeda's rotation in color. Fun stuff!

06/12/2024

My favorite picture of the week so far. They spent hours at the telescope mapping the invisible sky, and then they learned how to turn their data into pictures. The one's of the plane of our galaxy, near the center. It's full of stellar nurseries and supernova remnants. In the upper right are some distant galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers, screaming bright at radio wavelengths. And they caught a satellite on a north-south orbit.

06/12/2024

The 140 foot (and crescent moon) on set-up day at ERIRA 2024.

06/07/2024

AstroEdUNC group photo. We set out to host a different type of meeting -- no talks, no posters, all interactives: workshops teaching teachers how to use new tech in their ASTRO 101 classes, discussions and debates over ~30 "dangerous" questions in astronomy education, and the drafting of a ~100 page doc responding to these questions -- in only three hours!

Throwing a meeting of this size and scope was a real adventure. Thanks to SO MANY people, from the scientific and local organizing committees, to UNC for giving us the perfect venue for free, to Skynet's sponsors, to all of the participants who really threw themselves into the format and the goals of the meeting.

Might even be convinced to do it again sometime :)

05/02/2024

For my student's third large astrophotography project, each team imaged a different galaxy. My only requirement was that, as a class, they image not just normal spirals and starbursts, but also Seyferts and radio galaxies, ellipticals/lenticulars, and dwarfs -- for a class-wide activity on galaxy evolution that we'll do during the final exam period next week.

No one signed up for a dwarf galaxy, so I tried my hand at Barnard's galaxy. It's not big -- about the size of the Small Magellanic Cloud, but farther away in our Local Group.

Want to get more data (perhaps next year), but I think it turned out alright. My H-alpha layer didn't go deep enough, so I'm instead using 24-micron mid-infrared data from NASA's Spitzer spacecraft. It highlights similar, star-heated regions.

04/20/2024

Semester's almost over and I'm still catching up with my astrophotography students. For our star death assignment, I did a piece of the Jellyfish supernova remnant. This is about five hours of optical data (LRGB + hydrogen colored pink + sulfur colored blue), collected with one of my 16"-diameter telescopes in Chile, to which I've added archival infrared data from NASA's Spitzer (24 micron colored orange) and WISE (12 micron colored blue) spacecraft.

04/16/2024

I mapped each of these bright radio sources with Skynet's 20m-diameter radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory in WV. I "naturalized" their colors, mimicking what the human eye would see if it instead worked at this radio wavelength. Thermal sources should be blue (Moon), bremsstrahlung sources should be blue to white (Ori A), and synchrotron sources should be white to red (Tau A, Vir A, Cas A, and Cyg A).

And they are!

04/12/2024

I gave my students a 20 min lecture on my 2024 total eclipse experience, including some of the cool effects you can experience during these. Enjoy!