|
The Rose Center
at the American Museum of Natural History offers a
large variety of public
programs. Amongst these, are astronomy courses (2 hours a week for 6 weeks)
for the public which are not so different from undergraduate-level
introductory courses to the varoius fields of Astronomy.
With Simon Glover (now at MPI) we offered two courses: "Stellar Death" about the life,
work and miracles of stars, concentrating on how they
die dispersing their 'ashes' in interstellar space, and "Stellar Birth - life after
death", on how stellar ashes reconvene to form new stars. I also offered "Spectroscopy", which concentrated on the tools and technique of light dissection and included a great deal of atomic physics.
On-line courses. I tought a course in Astrobiology as well as co-designed, written and tought a course on Space, Time and Motion (basically Einstein's theoreies of Relativity). These were designed for lay audiences, but are taken by teachers working towards their masters in education and taking these courses as credits. This course will also be tought as part of the CUNY undergraduate curriculum.
Courses for high school students. Many courses are being offered that can be taken by high school students in the afternoons. This year we offered a course a designed on the foundation of stellar evolution and astrophysical research. In this course (2 hours per week for 5 weeks), I tought stellar evolution as well as mass determination of central stars of planetary nebula via differnt techniques. In so doing we worked with IRAF to analyze images, and FOTRAN to write programs to aid in the calulcation of quantities.Students from these course can become research interns at the department, and two of time will soon be starting working with me on newly-aquired HST data.
|
