Secondary School Students observe Venus with NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF)
Astronomy and astrophysics are regarded as highly motivating topics for students in primary and secondary schools, and they have been a recurrent and effective resource to inspire passion about science.
In fact, during the last years we have witnessed a boost of facilities providing small robotic telescopes for teachers and students to remotely undertake their own observing projects. A step forward is presented here, where we describe the experience of secondary school students attending professional observations of Venus at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) and, in a second observing run, conducting the observations by themselves.
In addition to quickly mastering the basic operation of the control software for the SpeX instrument, the students successfully performed different types of data acquisition, including drift scan imaging.
Javier Peralta, Juan A. Prieto, Pilar Orozco-Sáenz, Jesús González, Gonzalo Trujillo, Lucía Torres, Alberto Sánchez, Manuel Arnedo
Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure
Subjects: Physics Education (physics.ed-ph); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2303.10010 [physics.ed-ph] (or arXiv:2303.10010v1 [physics.ed-ph] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.10010
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Journal reference: Research Notes of the AAS 7, 53 (2023)
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3847/2515-5172/acc39e
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Submission history
From: Javier Peralta
[v1] Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:35:39 UTC (1,149 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10010
