Links related to my talk at the
Symposium on Horizons on Astronomy and Physics Education (SHAPE)
March 2023
Data and accessing it
- IRSA and IPAC
- LONG collection of links for the full version of the accessing data public talk aimed
at amateur astronomers - many, many, many useful links
- recording of the full version of the data talk for amateur astronomers
(~hour long, recorded in 2018) If you need to start from "what is an (astronomical) image"
or "what is a filter", start here.
- AAPT talk : intro to IRSA (10 minutes, 2020)
- Playlist on Filters,
Magnitudes, Colors, recorded in 2023, with many of the details that a NITARP team needs to know to work with
images and photometry. If you want to start making color-color and color-magnitude
diagrams, start here.
- Playlist with different
(occasionally more basic) intro videos
- IRSA
YouTube channel - also see this overview
page which explains the philosophy and organization of the videos.
- YouTube playlist from
IRSA with ideas for lesson plans
- NITARP Cool Wiki where we have
been trying to collect ideas, background information, etc. for doing things in classrooms with data from IPAC.
- A list of all the programs I know of
that get real astronomy data into the hands of teachers and students (grades 7-13). This list is long.
Very long. So long as to be overwhelming. Not everything listed there is still running - even before the
pandemic, some had stopped due to limitations in funding. Some of these programs are intensive commitments,
with annual cycles of eligibility, and some are more rolling admissions, where anyone can participate any
time. Some allow for lots of interaction with the people who run the program, and some depend on your
ability to read the documentation they've provided and learn on your own. (This is the case especially
for those programs that are no longer actively running, but have left their materials available on their
site -- for those, you really are totally on your own.) All involve access to real data, but some are
more "packaged", where you interact with a color image on a web page, and some are less "packaged", where
you have to download real (free) astronomy software to interact with the image in the format in which it
is archived, or develop your own Excel spreadsheet (or use other data management software) to manipulate
large tables of data. Many involve research, or building research skills in the manipulation of real
data. (For example, some of the stuff in the advanced SDSS Sky Server projects are pretty sophisticated
and can be easily expanded to use, e.g., more recent data, like Gaia instead of Hipparcos, and you can
easily get a pretty nice science fair project out of it.) It is going to take considerable time to go
through and find a program that both meets your needs and interests, AND is still running enough to
give you whatever level of support you need.
NITARP
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Last substantially modified March 2023 by rebull
Any opinions expressed here are well-reasoned and insightful, but in no
way reflect those of NASA, JPL, Caltech, or IPAC. No electrons were
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