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Robotic Telescopes, Student Research and Education Conference (RTSRE)

Melbourne, Australia. 10th-12th of December 2019


It is our great pleasure to provide a new call for collaboration from one of our sponsors, Skynet, a reminder about the LCO Education Partner Deadline, an announcement of a monthly zoom ASTROCOM meeting and a reminder about the conference proceedings deadline.
Proceedings Update
Don't forget! The official conference proceedings deadline is the 14th of September!

https://rtsre.net/ojs/index.php/rtsreconfproc
LCO Education Partner Deadline in One Week!
Do not forget that the Las Cumbres Observatory Education Partner program proposals for 2019 are due on September the 1st!

https://lco.global/news/call-for-education-partners-2019/
ASTROCOM Regular Zoom Meeting
Hello attendees from the Hilo conference! It was such a tremendous pleasure meeting all of you whom I had not met before and seeing again all of you whom I already knew! It was an incredible conference and we are very much looking forward to the partnerships and programs and new teaching practices in your classrooms that will arise from the meetings.

In order to maintain active conversations and to capitalize on the excitement and momentum of the conference we are establishing a monthly online meeting in the form of a 6 hour Zoom session to accommodate the very many time zones we inhabit. It will begin at 10:00 am PDT and end at 4:00 pm PDT on Friday the 24th of August. All members of the community are invited to join in and you may pop in and out at your convenience. We will post the zoom link information on http://astrocom.org/ where we are building an online community to support people interested in the many areas of Robotic Telescopes, Student Research and Education.

Here are the start times in different time zones: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20180831T170000&p1=1083&p2=137&p3=24&p4=179&p5=298&p6=152

We would love to hear about your recent endeavors in astronomy research and education, so if you’d like to prepare a 10-15 minute presentation that would be great. For the first meeting we will hear from Dan Reichart speaking about Skynet and things at 12:30 PDT (3:30 pm EDT, 7:30pm UTC, 5:30am Sat AEST) and Michael Fitzgerald about Our Solar Siblings at 14:30 PDT (5:30pm EDT, 9:30pm UTC, 7:30am Sat AEST).

Rachel Freed & the ASTROCOM team

Text reminders

If you would like text reminders about the monthly meetings you can join the Remind group by going to: https://www.remind.com/join/794c94

This is NOT the same Remind group that was used at the conference, but rather one specifically set up for announcements relating to monthly online gatherings.
Skynet looking for NSF grant partners.
The Skynet Robotic Telescope Network is seeking partners for a large, NSF IUSE grant proposal that we will submit in December 2018.  The proposal will expand on, and more deeply study, our Skynet-based lab/observing curriculum for non-majors, “Our Place In Space!”:
 
https://skynet.unc.edu/introastro/ourplaceinspace/ourplaceinspacelabs/
 
The introduction of this curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill resulted in a >100% increase in enrollment over a 5-year period – now 1 in 5 undergraduates take at least one of our introductory astronomy courses.  It additionally resulted in a 300% increase in astronomy-track majors, and contributed to our department being awarded two new tenure-track astronomy hires. 
This curriculum has since been adopted by roughly a dozen institutions, both large and small, and was the subject of a preliminary study, funded by an NSF TUES award.  The study found that once obvious factors, such as the grade that each student expected to receive, were controlled for, Skynet-based labs were one of only two course components that led to a statistically significant improvement in STEM attitudes.
The new proposal will update the curriculum to take advantage of our new “Afterglow 2.0” web-based image processing and analysis tool (which is also accessible to blind and visually impaired students, funded by a large NSF STEM+C award), and will further study *why* Skynet-based labs lead to STEM attitude gains.
 
Is it the sense of ownership students have from taking their own observations?  Is it that they took these observations using “real” telescopes that are concurrently used by “real” astronomers?  How many observations are necessary to achieve this effect?  Do larger observing requests, split between multiple students, or an entire class, yield the same results?  Can archival observations (e.g., of a too-long period Cepheid, or of a Type Ia SN) – but that were taken by the same telescopes – contribute?
At the same time, we are going to propose to develop a handful of intermediate-level, multi-band or multi-wavelength experiences.  Some will be optical only, but many will also make use of Skynet’s 20-meter diameter telescope at Green Bank Observatory.  Part of the grant will be for integrating radio image processing and analysis tools that we have been developing (e.g., https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06128) into Afterglow 2.0, making it a cross-band tool.
We are looking for:
 
  1. A larger sample of institutions willing to integrate our Skynet-based lab curriculum, in part or in whole, into their introductory astronomy course(s), and administer surveys to their students during the period of the award.
  2. Education specialists to help us design new, and more focused, survey instruments, and to manage their administration across many institutions.
  3. Astronomy and education specialists to help us develop, and to help us evaluate, the new, intermediate-level “color”-based optical and radio experiences.
  4. Telescopes with specific capabilities that we could integrate into Skynet.  Specifically:  (1) optical telescopes with large fields of view (to better match the scale of our radio maps), and (2) possibly another, similar-sized radio telescope, with at least L-band capability.
 
If interested in joining the partnership, please email Dan Reichart at reichart@unc.edu.
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