AAS 207th Meeting, 8-12 January 2006
Session 179 Evolution of Galaxies, and Galaxies Surveys at Low Redshift
Poster, Thursday, 9:20am-4:00pm, January 12, 2006, Exhibit Hall

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[179.24] The ALFALFA Undergraduate Workshop: Promoting Undergraduate Participation in a Legacy Survey Project

R. A. Koopmann (Union College), M. P. Haynes (Cornell University), J. Alonso (NAIC), R. Giovanelli (Cornell University), G. L. Hoffmann (Lafayette College), B. R. Kent, S. Stierwalt (Cornell University), J. J. Salzer (Wesleyan University)

Undergraduate participation is a desireable but often challenging goal for legacy-style projects that occur over long time scales and involve large collaborations. The ALFALFA (Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA) project, which is surveying 7000 square degrees of the Arecibo extragalactic sky in the 21 cm HI line, includes a working group on the effective involvement of undergraduates in ALFALFA research projects. As partof this work, the 'First ALFALFA Undergraduate Workshop' was held July 6 and 7, 2005, at Union College in Schenectady, New York. The workshop provided lectures at the undergraduate level covering the science background and technical details of the project to 25 participants, including 13 undergraduates involved in summer research with ALFALFA. The highlight of the workshop was a 1.5 hour remote observing session at Arecibo. Planning the observations became part of the students' summer research experience as they worked together as a team (via email) in the weeks before the workshop to construct and submit an observing proposal. Part of the second day of the workshop was devoted to reducing the data, and students continued to meet electronically after the workshop to analyze the data. Further ALFALFA observations of this field are planned for spring 2006 and several of the students are working on research and thesis projects using the ALFALFA dataset (see poster by Ayala et al.). Funding for the workshop was provided by NSF AST-0307396, NST AST-0407011, and the Brinson Foundation.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://egg.astro.cornell.edu/alfalfa/ugrad/index.php. 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: koopmanr@union.edu

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