Published: December 15, 2006
Two of Mr. Adkins' students, Thomas Travagli and Alekzandir Morton, are planning to enter the Jr. Science and Humanities Symposium with papers. Morton's paper will deal with data reduction and the interpretation of the light curves. Travagli did most of the work on the modeling of the infrared emission with a blackbody curve generator, and will discuss what he learned about that. Travagli, Morton and another student, Manutej Mulaveesala, will be entering the Contra Costa County Science and Engineering Fair later this spring, and expect to submit entries to the RBSE journal as well.
These three students and John Michael Santiago, who participated in the Pasadena data reduction trip, were interviewed by our local paper (the Antioch Press). The article is archived at http://www.antiochpress.com/article.cfm?articleID=1085#. The city of Antioch has a population of over 100,000 and this newpaper is delivered free to most homes. They also were written up in their school newspaper, which has a circulation of 3600.
Jeff Adkins will be doing workshops about the Spitzer research project at the California Partnership Academy conference in San Diego later this spring; at the National Science Teacher's Association meeting in March, and at the Mt. Diablo Astronomical Society in May. He also traditionally gives the school board of his district a briefing in May or June.
Still in progress is a write up for the procedures used to analyze the data, including the ground-based data they collected along with the Spitzer data. He also has a student assigned to building a large-scale Spitzer model from the cutout provided at the Cool Cosmos site. In the indefinite future is a long range goal of seeking funding to build infrared-astronomy exhibits at their planetarium similar to those they saw last year at the Flandreau planetarium in Tucson, including finding funding for an infrared camera.