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R. J. Nemiroff (Michigan Technological University), Night Sky Live Collaboration
Show your class a full live night sky with a single click. The Night Sky Live project now has 10 fisheye CONtinuous CAMeras (CONCAMs) deployed around the world that send live images of the night sky back to http://NightSkyLive.net every few minutes. Any classroom that has access to a web browser can see the current night sky, live, horizon to horizon, similar in depth to what the human eye can see, and annotated, above a major observatory somewhere in the world. Additionally, archived images and automatically generated movies show how the night sky appeared over the past night and the past year, and how it will likely appear above your student's heads tonight, all through the night. Stars, planets, and constellations are automatically labelled. In addition to live products, canned on-line tutorials for beginning students use archived NSL images to explain concepts such as diurnal motion and and demonstrate the transience of variable stars. Projects for more advanced undergraduates include using the automatically generated photometry files to follow the light curves of well known stars such as Polaris, Betelgeuse, and Alpha Centauri.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://NightSkyLive.net. 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.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.