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M. J. Raddick (Johns Hopkins University), R. Sparks (The Prairie School, Racine, WI)
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has developed an extensive array of education and public outreach activities, focused on the SkyServer web site. SkyServer (http://skyserver.sdss.org) offers easy access to the complete dataset of the SDSS, nearly 90 million stars and galaxies.
Although the SDSS is primarily an optical survey, we have developed activities that link SDSS data to data from other surveys. Cross-correlations to ROSAT (x-rays) and FIRST (radio) are included in SkyServer, and many other surveys can be cross-correlated with SDSS data using SkyQuery (http://www.skyquery.org).
We have developed a “Sky Surveys” activity for high school, community college, and college teachers. The activity teaches students about historical and modern sky surveys; students compare SDSS images to POSS (an optical survey from the 1950s), and compare images seen by the SDSS to the images of same objects from radio and x-ray data. The activity includes a teacher’s guide with sample solutions, a lesson plan, and a scoring rubric. We are also developing other activities that use SkyQuery and the National Virtual Observatory’s (http://www.us-vo.org) Data Inventory Service.
In this presentation, I will demonstrate these activities, provide handouts for teachers, and discuss the future directions that SDSS outreach will take.
We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Space Telescope Science Institute’s IDEAS program (http://ideas.stsci.edu), the National Science Foundation’s Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, and the Maryland Space Grant Consortium.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://skyserver.sdss.org. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: raddick@pha.jhu.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #2
© YEAR. The American Astronomical Soceity.