TLRBSE, Novae and WIYN Active Solar Longitudes Extra Solar Planets Deep Lens Survey			TLRBSE, Novae and WIYN Dr. George Jacoby Director, WIYN Observatory Dr. Travis Rector NOAO Astronomer The 3.5-m telescope at Kitt Peak will be joined by Kitt Peak's 0.9-m telescope in fall 2001 as renovations to the classic RBSE telescope continue. Study opportunities will include the addition of the 3.5-m WIYN to study different and more distant galaxies. Spiral galaxies M81, M51 and M101 and elliptical galaxies M105 and M49 will be added to the current menu of galaxies. Remote observing experiences via the internet may be added. The larger telescope makes an entirely new kind of project available to RBSE and TLRBSE teachers and classes, including: Direct measurement of distance to far-away galaxies. "Long Period Variables" that pulsate with cycles of 0.5 to 3 years. Monthly observations will make long period studies possible. Additional years of TLRBSE will allow improvement of the results, unlike the nova project, where more observations add new objects. Improvements to the Nova Project will include: Coordinates - since many reported coordinates between different groups didn't agree very well, and some confusion for groups concerning precession and "epochs", a 1 page summary on RA, DEC may be helpful. Catalog - the recurrent nova questions would benefit from a compilation of published nova positions, precessed to year 2000. New Galaxies - information on M33 and NGC 6822 will be made available for distribution
			Return to top of page
TLRBSE, Novae and WIYN Active Solar Longitudes Extra Solar Planets Deep Lens Survey			Active Solar Longitudes Dr. Frank Hill, NSO Astronomer Travis Stagg, Girard College Carl Henney Harry Jones Mike Gearen Suzanne Jacoby, Education Officer - NOAO In an attempt to learn more about the 11-year solar activity cycle, including sunspots and solar flares, the appearance of active regions that cluster in certain locations, like volcanic hot spots on Earth, has been noticed. What are the characteristics of these active longitudes? Where are they? How fast do they rotate? What do they tell us about the inside of the sun and the origin of the active regions? The sun rotates "differentially," rather than "solidly" like the Earth. The solar equator rotates faster than the poles. The equatorial synodic rotation period is 26.59 days, polar is 33.66 days, based on individual sunspot tracers. Helioseismology shows that the inside of the sun also rotates differentially through the outer 30% of its volume, and then solidly below that level. Combining the magnetograms from one solar rotation into a picture of the magnetic field over the entire solar surface produces what is known as a synoptic map. Since the sun rotates differentially, longitude reference frames must be defined for a single rotation rate, the Carrington rate, referred to 20º latitude, and synodic period of 27.2753 days. Carrington rotations have been counted since November 9, 1853. Students will have access to magnetograms covering two solar cycles. They will measure positions and areas of active regions, calculating the rotation rates. Results will be returned to the National Solar Observatory via a web site address. Scientific analysis will then be carried out by the NSO staff. This project provides students with easy to do lesson modules that reproduce well known facts. Easy to do scientific research that is beyond the scope of the classroom. The solar data your students will obtain will be relevant to many areas of study, with easy to obtain results that are readily reproducible. Since some solar research requires so much human input, this project permits students to make a genuine contribution to the scientific community. Some of the questions that may be potentially answered by this research project include: Where are the active longitudes? Does their position change with time? What is their rotation rate? At what depth is this rotation rate found? Is the rotation rate different in the northern and southern hemispheres? How does the rotation rate of an active region depend on its area?
			Return to top of page
TLRBSE, Novae and WIYN Active Solar Longitudes Extra Solar Planets Deep Lens Survey			Extra Solar Planets Dr. Steve Howell, Astronomer Planetary Science Institute - Astrophysics Group Photometry is the measure of the flux output of a bright object. This brightness is measured at a variety of wavelengths as seen by the eye and with telescopes. The brightness or magnitude of an object is defined as a difference or ratio between the brightness of objects as compared to the magnitude of a reference object, such as the star Vega. If the brightness of an object like a star is measured over a period of time, this information can be plotted to reveal changes in this brightness. Plots from several objects in the same portion of the sky should reveal differences in the magnitudes of these stars as they change. These differences could be subtracted from each other to reveal whether these changes are due to sky quality, or individual characteristics of the object(s) being viewed. If sky quality is responsible for the changes in light curves, each object should be similarly degraded, and this difference should be obvious when the curves are subtracted. If, however, the changes in the star's brightness is due to physical characteristics of the light itself, this may indicate the presence of either sunspots on the surface of the star, or the eclipsing of the body by another object, such as a companion star or planet. This is the process that has been used to authenticate the discovery of nearly all of the 55+ extra solar planets that are thus far known. All of these planets have been originally located using spectroscopy. It is the goal of this project to attempt to locate further planets using photometry alone. Beginning in January 2002, we will attempt to capture light curves from approximately 100,000 stars per year. Data will be collected and reduced automatically using the 1.3-m telescope on Kitt Peak, a 2048 x 2048 CCD, more than 15 filters and "live" video. Corrections for atmsopheric extinction and seeing fluctuations will be automatically applied to each curve. A differential light curve will be produced for each star in the field by comparing it to the mean of this ensemble. PSI will produce text files listing the light curve data and colors for each star in the field, as well as analyze the data for variable objects. The implications for TLRBSE and RBSE teachers and students will include the light curve data for variable stars and planet searches. PSI will make available both raw and reduced image data to construct light curves, extended objects and pretty pictures, as well as making available the 1.3-m telescope for classes to propose projects for "review" by the Institute. Much data and other material will be available for class use via the internet.
			Return to top of page
TLRBSE, Novae and WIYN Active Solar Longitudes Extra Solar Planets Deep Lens Survey			The Deep Lens Survey Dr. Dara Norman - Astronomer Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory The universe is made up of structures. Groups of stars are organized into galaxies, groups of galaxies into clusters and clusters into super-clusters. With telescopes we can study the light from these stars, galaxies and clusters, but we are only scratching the surface of what the universe is composed of. Dynamical measurements of galaxies and clusters indicate that more than 95% of the matter in the universe is not bright, that is, this matter does not give off light at any measureable wavelength. Gravitational lensing makes it possible to "see" this dark matter as a result of the bending of light waves as they pass near a large massive object. This massive object may be visible, like a star or galaxy, or not visible, indicative of dark, intergalactic matter. Gravitational lensing may be either strong or weak. Strong lensing is the result of the bending of light around a massive object that produces a visible ring or arc of light around the image of an object, such as a galaxy. This type of lensing is visible in images of Abell 2218 as taken by the Hubble telescope. Weak lensing will not produce obvious arcs or rings, but merely smears the light of an object such as a galaxy only slightly. Images illustrating weak lensing may be interpretted as such when one or more galaxies appear to have been elongated in the same direction, indicating the presence of one or more bodies of dark matter between the object and the viewer. The purpose of the Deep Lens Survey is to find these areas of weak lensing. In order to use weak lensing as a means to find large-scale dark matter dominated structures, we would like the survey to be: Large - distortion analyses are based on correlations of the galaxy shapes. Many, many galaxies over a large area of sky are required. Unbiased - sampling needs to be done over large contiguous regions in many random directions. Need to be able to observe ALL the bright matter in those regions. Deep - the effect of gravitational lensing increases with the amount of matter between object and observer. We want to probe he evolution of structures from early to late times in the history of the universe. Multi-colored - observations with several filters will allow us to get an idea of the three dimensional positon of the galaxies, allowing a "topological map" of large scale structures. Because the survey needs to be large and deep, several exposures of each field are required, thus variable objects will inevitably be discovered. The Deep Lens Survey is a collaboration of 24 investigators from approximately 14 institutions. The full survey is scheduled for completion in 2003. It is an ultra deep optical sruvey of seven 4 square degree fields, with each field observed with four filters as 9 subfields of 40 square arcminutes. The time between observations of a single subfield will vary from hours to weeks or a year depending on a variety of things. Observations will be taken with the NOAO Blanco 4-m telescope in Chile and the Mayall 4-m at Kitt Peak using the MOSAIC CCD imagers. The DLS data produces will be released to the astronomical community as multicolor data. The first completed subfield is being released as of July 2001. This data release includes a catalog of detected objects and the full multi-color subfield image. Individual calibrated images will be released to the astronomical community on a longer time scale. Discovered transients data will be released in real time. Forty square arcsec transient fields will be flatfielded and matched to approximately 1 arcsec. Images can be supplied on shorter timescales as compressed FITS files. Some questions to be answered prior to releasing this material as a RBSE project include: What science will be done? Which regions are needed? Which filers are needed? What size images are required? Should images taken in different filters be aligned? Are other calibration products needed? Is other catalog information needed? How much compression of the data can be tolerated without degrading the images?
			Return to top of page