Published: June 15, 2006
Ms. Hemphill read the article "When galaxies collide: supercomputers reproduce fluid motions of cosmic duet Simulations forecast favorable conditions for verifying Einstein predictions" and sent to a colleague for feedback on the interacting galaxy model.
The student with whom Ms. Hemphill is working has completed the ISEF form 7 continuation forms to continue an astronomy related project. She is continuing to read in Sparke & Gallagher. Students in Ms. Hemphill's senior elective, Introduction to Organic, included in their lab notebooks comparisons between theoretical Spartan IR spectra and experimental IR spectra they collected in April. They critiqued the theoretical spectra for being downshifted from the experimentally observed peaks. Students in an independent study class, Science, Technology, and Society, as part of the class developed blogs and posted work on topics related to astrobiology and indirectly related to some topics in this program.
To flesh out the materials provided in the SOFIA Active Astronomy kits received for a workshop, Ms. Hemphill obtained materials to roughly double the number of audio photocell kits for use in the teacher workshop and ordered the photocell parts. The teachers contacted for the workshop were those who had attended the Thermal Imaging Workshop and/or who expressed specific interest in the SOFIA topics of "Sensing the Invisible" and "Listening to Light." The goals of the workshop were to introduce teachers to the SOFIA kit materials, to put together the solar cell and transmitter circuit assemblies, and then to put together a teaching set of eight kits of these assemblies for rotation among teachers in the fall. Permission for copying the Active Astronomy CD for teachers at the workshop was given by Dana Backman of SOFIA. The workshop was held June 07, 2006 with the help of a physics colleague. The single most impressive activity in the Jun 7 SOFIA workshop was the activity in which an IR LED was connected to a power supply; when the photocell-audio detector was brought close in a darkened room, the audio response to the invisible IR light impressed everyone in the room. A good way to demonstrate that IR light is there even when you cannot see it.