Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 1996
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996aas...189.0412d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 189th AAS Meeting, late abstracts, #4.12; Bulletin of the American Astronomical, Vol. 29, p. 728
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We are developing interactive World Wide Web astronomy labs for the large introductory classes at Northwestern University. Most of the students taking these courses are not science majors. Students perform the labs in their dorm rooms, or in a tutorial room equipped with Power Macintoshes, staffed by teaching assistants. Although the labs are serious science, our intent is to make them fun, and to provide students the freedom to explore. The first lab, ``The Extragalactic Distance Scale,'' features a real Cepheid hunt in the Virgo Cluster galaxy M100. Students stalk Cepheid variable stars by blinking HST (archive) WFPC2 images of M100 taken at 6 different epochs. If a student clicks on a known Cepheid, the light curve for that Cepheid appears. After finding an appropriate number of Cepheids, students use the light curves and the period-luminosity relation to calculate the distance to M100. Lastly, they estimate the Hubble constant and the age of the universe. Cepheid identifications and light curves are from Ferrarese et al. (1996) Astrophys. J., 464, 568. After initial testing and revision at Northwestern, the labs will be packaged for downloading to local UNIX servers. The labs currently run on the Apache 1.1.1 server, and are designed for Netscape 2.0 and higher.
Dutkevitch Diane
Meyer David M.
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