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Wiki for the NASA IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP)

What is the NASA IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP)?

NITARP, the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program, gets teachers involved in authentic astronomical research. We partner small groups of largely high school educators with a mentor professional astronomer for an original research project. NITARP (combined with its predecessor, the Spitzer Teacher Program) has been running since 2005.

What and Who is this Wiki for?

This wiki has now been commandeered to be a place for us to collect bits and pieces of lessons that might be useful to NITARP alumni or other educators (grade 7 through college). It used to be a dynamic environment for NITARP participants to work, and as such, there may very well be pages here that are .. less than polished. We have tried to isolate those pages where possible.

We encourage you to think critically about the information that is here, and ask for help or clarification if you need it.

Guide to NITARP participants for use of the wiki.

How to use this Wiki?

I suspect everyone agrees that Legos are awesome. You can build nearly anything with them. You can get a set, build it according to the instructions, and then take it apart and build something wildly different than the designer intended with those very same Legos.

That's what this site is designed to be -- a pile of Lego bricks. We have some components that are more like single Lego bricks, and some that are more like Lego pieces extremely customized to a single purpose. And, some of the individual constituents are more .. piles of melted plastic and not yet actually a Lego brick. We have provided in some cases ideas for how they can be put together to do something, and we plan more. You may see how something could come together that we did not envision!

There are four main categories of resources on this site:

• Background/general reference (e.g., units, central wavelengths, magnitudes)
• Skill development (e.g., using IRSA tools)
• Science background (e.g., about young stars)
• Coherent ideas of what to do with these pieces

Within each of these broad topics are smaller, well, "Lego brick" topics. Within each of these topics, the most polished stuff is at the top of the page, and the least polished stuff is at the bottom.

Note that this wiki is not designed to replace a basic astronomy textbook for general introduction to astronomy information. We're assuming that you've already gotten that information elsewhere. Here is a good, free, online one if you need a textbook.

How does the Spitzer Telescope work?

A very general introduction to the Spitzer Space Telescope, with links to go to for more information.

What other kinds of archival data are part of NITARP?

A general introduction to all of the archives housed at IPAC that are part of NITARP.

Research Tools

How to get started, software, tutorials, overviews, and more.

Future Research Project Ideas

Here is a place to explore future research project ideas.

Misc. Lesson Plans, Activities, and Useful Websites

Please feel free to contribute. We do ask that you include your wiki signature (click on the username/date stamp button in the edit window) when submitting lesson plans and activities. This will help users of the site in the event they have questions. Also, when posting a website, please provide a brief description of the site along with the web link.

Wiki Development Plans

Stuff we're still working on re-organizing or writing ab initio.