Kenneth J. Mighell (National Optical Astronomy Observatory)
Katy Garmany (National Optical Astronomy Observatory)
Kristen Larson (Western Washington University)
Kathy DeGioia Eastwood (Northern Arizona University)
ABSTRACT
The Virtual Observatory provides several tools that are useful for educators. With these tools, instructors can easily provide real data to students in an environment that engages student curiosity and builds student understanding. In this poster we demonstrate how the tools Aladin and TOPCAT can be used to enhance astronomy education. The Aladin Sky Atlas is a Virtual Observatory portal from the CDS that displays images, superimposes catalogs, and provides interactive access to data. For illustration, we show an exercise for non-science majors in a college-level astronomy course that introduces students to the HR diagram of star clusters. After launching the pre-loaded Aladin applet, students select their own stars, connecting visual cues of brightness and color to the conceptual meaning behind a quantitative HR diagram. TOPCAT can be linked with Aladin on the desktop to let students analyze their data, perform calculations, and create professional-quality graphs. The basic exercise can be easily expanded to address other learning objectives and provides a launching point for students to access, visualize, and explore multi-wavelength data as they continue in astronomy. As a second example, we show an exercise that uses TOPCAT to do three-dimensional plotting of the positions of open and globular cluster to illustrate galactic structure. Detailed information is available at the following website: http://www.noao.edu/staff/mighell/nvoss2008/ . This research was done at the 2008 U.S. National Virtual Observatory Summer School which was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 3 - 11, 2008 and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
We got Digitized Sky Survey imagery of the Pleiades star cluster. We found BV stellar photometry of the Pleiades in Table 6 of Clampitt & Burstein (1997, AJ, 114, 699). This data was published in Volume 9 (1997) of the AAS CD-Rom Series which we did not have access to. Luckily the VizieR Service has this data in dataset J/AJ/114/699/table6 which we retrieved as a VOTable. The Pleiades data was converted from the VOTable format to a Tab Separated Value format using the IVOA stilts tool, Emacs, and SuperMongo. After the image and photometry data were uploaded to the Aladin Sky Atlas tool, we exported the data to the IVOA TOPCAT tool. We investigated the suitability of this combination of Aladin with Topcat as a possible teaching tool for undergraduates in an Astronomy 101 class.
The URL for this activity:
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinJava?script=get+Local(http://www.noao.edu/staff/mighell/nvoss/red.fits,visible,SkyViewDSS2),Local(http://www.noao.edu/staff/mighell/nvoss/blue.fits,blue,SkyViewDSS2),Local(http://www.noao.edu/staff/mighell/nvoss/Pleiades.tsv,data,ClampittBurstein1997)+Pleiades;reticle+off;sync
You could type the whole URL yourself...
or just click on the following link:
which is a whole lot easier!
