What is this project?

The Spitzer Space Telescope Teacher Program

The Spitzer Space Telescope Teacher Program is a collaboration between the Spitzer Science Center (SSC) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). The program allows a few teachers (and a few very lucky students) to do research using observing time on the Spitzer Space Telescope. In total, the program uses a few hours of Director's discretionary observing time to use for different observations. The teachers are divided into subgroups to work on Spitzer observing projects and many teachers work on more than one subgroup. Each subgroup is paired with a scientist from the SSC community and, sometimes, also NOAO scientists. Each subgroup has a lead scientist who serves as the mentor and technical contact for the individual observing project.

The first round of participating teachers attended a Fall 2004 workshop (in Tucson, AZ) to become familiar with the Spitzer Space Telescope and receive training in infrared astronomy and observational techniques. The teachers also attended a workshop in January 2005 (in San Diego, CA) to learn about planning observations, and telescope and instrument capabilities. The second round started, with a slightly different model of how to work the program, in 2005. In 2006, the GAVRT program started - this program also pairs teachers and scientists to use Spitzer data, but this is yet again a slightly different model.

Once the telescope collects all of the data for a project, the teachers visit the Spitzer Science Center (in Pasadena, CA) to begin the data analysis with the scientists. Teachers may choose to bring one or two students to this data analysis meeting.

The abstracts for all the projects are available on this website.

Goal of any of these research projects

The general goal of all of these Spitzer teacher research projects is (was) to produce (a) at least one poster paper at an AAS meeting, and (b) a journal article. A conference poster is generally a work in progress, and can be rough (though it doesn’t have to be). Its main purpose is to advertise your work and get feedback from peers. A journal article is everything wrapped up in a nice package, with all loose ends accounted for and all assertions thoroughly justified. Its main purpose is to get your work into a permanent place where generations afterwards can read and learn from it. It is peer-reviewed by a (usually anonymous) referee.

So where do you fit into all of this?

If you are selected as a teacher or student researcher in one of these Spitzer projects, you will have the unique experience of working collaboratively with a group of people to research, form hypotheses, interpret data and draw conclusions. In short, you will truly become a research scientist! Your collaborators will include other students from your school, your teacher, other students and teachers from across the country, and a real research astronomer from either NOAO or SSC/JPL.

What will you be doing?

For starters, you will need to learn a huge amount of material about infrared astronomy, the Spitzer telescope and the object you are studying. This wiki is only a start. You will need to use the ADS website to do a literature search, e.g., research and read previous abstracts that are relevant to your research. You will also learn to use various computer programs, including Leopard and MaxIm DL, to view and analyze images of your object. You may be chosen to represent your school as a student researcher on a trip to Caltech/JPL in Pasadena. There, you will meet with other students, teachers and your scientist(s). It’s important that you are well prepared for this meeting, so expect to have lots of work and reading if you are chosen.

The meeting at Caltech/JPL will be a high point of all of your hard work, but not the last step! Most of your time there will be spent with scientists as well as other teachers/students. They will teach you a few things along the way, but most of our time will be spent analyzing the data/final images. Once you return from the trip to Caltech/JPL, you will be involved in writing the final paper, which we plan to have published in a peer-reviewed journal.