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January-March 2007 updates for Ms. Hemphill

Published: March 15, 2007

During January, Mrs. Hemphill attended the AAS meeting in Seattle. The student working with her on Spitzer data also attended the meeting. They both attended the Spitzer lunch meeting with Stephen Pompea and had the opportunity to peruse many posters and attend sessions. It was a valuable learning experience and "easy" to do because it was so close to Portland.

The Star Formation team has completed and repeated the data reduction for cl1037. They await the c values for work on cl1227 and cl1232. Mrs. Hemphill's Spitzer student used the data for cl1037 to look at star formation rates out from the center of the cluster and in pairs within the cluster. She completed her analysis and a report on her work and presented her work orally to teachers and other students at their school. She also presented her work at the Oregon Junior Academy of Science at Western Oregon University on February 23, 2007 and at the Aardvark Expo on March2, 2007; her project was selected for First Place honors in Physics and as Best of Fair. she will present her work at the International Science and Engineering Fair in May. The four students who used a FLIR camera to collect images of chemical reactions completed their experiments, reported their work, and presented their findings at the Aardvark Expo. One team received an Honorable Mention in Chemistry for comparing the Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction recorded with a regular video camera with the same reaction recorded with a FLIR camera.

During lessons on atomic structure and on spectra, students learned about infrared spectra. Mrs. Hemphill introduced images of stellar objects recorded in visible, UV, and IR wavelengths. She also set up a donated spectroscope and prism so students could see how a spectroscope works. Students measured the visible wavelengths for hydrogen using handheld spectroscopes. Mrs. Hemphill used thermal images of our classes on the class webpages. Students took thermal portraits for an elementary class and made sure the images were delivered to the classroom.

In general, students in Mrs. Hemphill's chemistry class are learning more about the IR portion of the spectrum and about how it differs from visible wavelengths. Students using a thermal imaging camera learned specific ways in which "seeing" in the IR differs from the visible. Specifically, students using a FLIR thermal imaging camera for independent projects were able to see for themselves the different kinds of information they could get from thermal images. The one student who is working with Spitzer images of clusters developed her individual research question around star formation rates in cl1037 and presented her data. So students have benefited from this program at different levels.

Mrs. Hemphill anticipates including IR-related topics as regular topics in the chemistry curriculum. She would like to figure out a way for students to use the Spitzer images to develop independent projects. Mrs. Hemphill plans to present a session related to this program and ways to bring IR into the classroom at the Oregon Science Teacher Conference in October and to outline classroom uses for thermal imaging in the OSTA journal.

Mrs. Hemphill talked to a professor at our local medical school. He was interested in using thermal imaging for medical education. She told him about the program and about using thermal imaging camera at school, and passed along some of the physiology uses teachers suggested during a workshop. She provided him with information about how I borrowed a FLIR camera and about estimated costs for the cameras. He said he intended to apply for a grant for a thermal camera.

On March 10, Mrs. Hemphill attended an Astrophotography workshop for working with digital images of stars and galaxies at OMSI, our science museum.

We're back from the Jan 2024 AAS and we had a grand time!