UNDERGRADUATES

During the Summer 2001, Jeff Tharp, an undegraduate at the University of North Carolina-Asheville was an intern working on daytime photometry techniques directly related to the OVIEW project of seeing and transparency measurements.  Jeff enjoyed the benefits of participating in the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy Research Experience for Undergraduates (SARA-REU) Program. Jeff Tharp’s Daytime Photometry Paper: Summer 2001 can be downloaded as a PDF file. 

Another undergraduate, also from UNC-Asheville, worked with his mentor, Randy Booker (who was on sabbatical during the Fall 2001) to map regions of star formation at 4.8 GHz using the West 26 m radio  telescope. One of their maps of W49 is shown below.

South Carolina State University  PAIR students work on an upgrade to the PARI 4.6-m Smiley radio telescope. The PAIR program provides SCSU undergraduates with research and technology devleopment experience.  Four teams of four (three students and one professor) visit PARI several times a year. The image below shows one team measuring dimensions of the telescope feed box which they need to know for development of  a temperature controlled housing for the feed.

In the image below,  three SCSU students are working on LabView programming to control the positioning motions of Smiley.  Their contributions equal the knowledge they gain as they work on engineering and physics problems related to Smiley’s upgrade.  At least they are still smiling

HIGH SCHOOL

The main attraction at PARI for high schol students is the Smiley 4.6 m radio telescope. Students come in group;s, or work individually on Senior Projects.  For example, sttudents from Reynolds H.S. and the North Carolina School of Science and  Math each visited and worked extensively with the telescopes on projects that included mapping the Galactic Center, refinining telescope pointing, and measuring the flux from quasars.

Six young scholars from A.C. Reynolds High School in Buncombe County near Asheville, N.C. (A.C.R. HS  Website) visited PARI November 5, 2001. The group, plus three of their curious teachers are shown below.

These students and teachers are the first group to pre-beta test the School of Galactic Radio Astronomy learning experience. Below they are standing in front of the 4.6-m radio telescope while being shown Smiley's dish and feed.  !

The young scholars finally got down to business in the the PARI Control Center where they pointed  Smiley  at several bright radio sources. They compared the radio brightness of the Sun to Cassiopea A, a supernova remnant, and Cygnus A, a radio loud galaxy. They found both Cas A and Cyg A to be brighter than the Sun at 1420  MHz (21 cm) line of hydrogen.

If they had radio eyes,  they would be told not to look directly at the Sun and Cas A.

SENIOR PROJECTS

Joshua Clark, from Freedom High School in Burke County, NC visited once a week from September 2001 through October 2001 to work on his Senior Project. His project was mapping the galactic plane at 1420 MHZ, with the intent of determining the velocity structure. This is similar to what the NCSSM students did, but Joshua used the West 26-m radio telescope instead of Smiley, and sampled at a higher spatial resolution at fewer points along the plane (30 arcminute resolution rather than 3 degree resolution used with Smiley). One of his raw data scans is shown below.  The x-axis is frequency and the y-axis is intensity. In this particular scan several velocity peaks are observed - a somewhat complicated structure often found in supernova remnants

During the 3 months of his observations, he will only be able to cover about 90 degrees in Galactic  Longitude. The graph shown below is a plot of the velocities measured by Joshua versus distances  of the objects he meaasured. The  velocities have not been corrected for local motions, but nevertheless show the trend of increasing velocity away from the Galactic center.  The four data points with relatively low  velocities at large distances are reflection nebula (marked by arrows that are  located within a few hundred parsecs of the Sun.  So, we are seeing local motion in these  objects. The line represents the trend  towards higher velocities at increasing distances.