Once again, summer in La Serena means a beach full of tourists and the Recinto full of summer students in astronomy and engineering.
A total of 19 well-qualified applicants competed for the four available positions in the 1999 Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. This NSF-sponsored program is open to undergraduate students in astronomy and physics from US institutions. Our site director is Don Hoard. The 1999 REU students are:
Alicia Soderberg (Bates). Alicia will be working with Nick Suntzeff on a project to analyze observations of SN 1987A.
Jeremy Buss (Wisconsin, Oshkosh). Jeremy will be working with Knut Olsen, attempting to understand the elliptical bubble HII region "Hubble II" in NGC 6822.
Jenny Greene (Yale). Jenny will be working with Stefanie Wachter to determine the orbital period of the low mass X-ray binary LMC X-2, using data from the YALO telescope.
Jessica Kim-Quijano (Towson). Jessica will be working with Don Hoard to determine the orbital period of the unusual double-lined cataclysmic variable Phe 1.
More information about the CTIO REU Program can be found on our web page at http://www.ctio.noao.edu/REU/reu.html.
This year we have started a new program for advanced Chilean astronomy students, the CTIO Practica de Investigacion en Astronomia (PIA) program. This program is open to all Chilean astronomy students in their last year of undergraduate or first two years of graduate school. We have one participant this year:
Ricardo Demarco (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile). Ricardo will be working with Nick Suntzeff and Bob Schommer on a cosmology-related project.
We also have two Chilean engineering students working in the Engineering section for their practicas ("real world" work experiences which form part of their educational curriculum):
Mario Caceres, an EE student (U. Federico Santa Maria). Mario is working with Roger Smith on monitoring nocturnal clouds, OH emission and light pollution with CCDs and wide angle lenses.
Cecil Acevedo, an EE student (UFSM). Cecil is working with Marco Bonati to develop a GUI which will monitor and log engineering telemetry data from all Arcon CCD systems in use over the local network.
In addition to research and work experiences, the CTIO summer programs provide an opportunity for cultural enrichment. We encourage this by housing all the US and Chilean students together in Casa 13, with the responsibility of doing their own shopping, cooking, and housekeeping —great vocabulary builders in both languages! They'll be there until around 20 March, when the REU program officially ends.
Malcolm Smith (msmith@noao.edu),
Don Hoard (dhoard@noao.edu),
Ricardo Schmidt (rschmidt@noao.edu),
Roger Smith (rsmith@noao.edu)