RAS » Education

Astrofest, Chicago 5-7 September

Your science coordinator, Ed Wiley, attended the 2008 Astrofest, the annual festival-under-the-stars of the Chicago Astronomical Society.There were a variety of speakers including Dr. Chris Lintott (Oxford) who spoke on his work with the Galaxy Zoo, Ed who talked about research opportunities for amateur astronomers, Greg Selleck who spoke on asteroid hunting and Audrey Fisher, Director of StarPals, who spoke on light pollution. James Cuca, one of GRAS' master astrophotographers, gave a great workshop on astrophotography. Skies were cloudy over Kankakee but not at New Mexico Skies. Jessi Kingan of StarPals demonstrated the power and simplicity of the GRAS telescopes for several hours.

GRAS Grants to Students

GRAS Scholarships. A limited number of GRAS grants are available to high school students (US equivalent grades 9-12) for conducting a research project through our RAS Observatory in Mayhill or the Moorook Observatory in Australia. See the GRAS press release.

Requirements:

Student grades 9-12 in good academic standing are eligible. No age or country-of-origin requirements. Each student must have a faculty sponsor who will agree to assist the student in meeting the goals of the grant. Quarterly reports of progress required to insure goals are being met.

Guidelines:

The proposal should briefly outline to kind and scope of the research project. Relatively simple, but valuable projects include. Variable star observations (Photometrica program available for analysis)
Double Star observations.
More advanced programs, suitable for advanced observers include asteroid discovery, non-NEO, and main belt.
Certain kinds of programs would be discouraged unless the advisor has personally and successfully engaged in the research or additional matching funds are available to permit additional telescope time. These categories would be as follows:

Asteroid light curves (typically takes 8 hour blocks of time, would require matching funding)
Exoplanet light curves or discovery
Supernova searches (requires larger blocks of time, would require matching funding.)

The grant petition should include the following sections:

The Introduction should include a brief outline of the kind of research and its significance. References are appropriate.
Methods and materials: Included in methods and materials should be the following: how the data will be collected; how the data will be analyzed. References are appropriate.
Deliverables: Deliverables refers to where the data will be deposited or published. Certain kinds of data, like variable star observations or asteroid astrometry, are deposited in data banks. Other kinds of data, such as visual double star observations, are usually published.