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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 this Wiki is 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. And, for sure, there are old pages from the prior incarnation of this site that may turn up during searches but that may not be relevant any longer.

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.

Open questions

Yes, we are in the middle of a massive reorganization. Please bear with us.

Nomenclature. Lego blocks? YSO stages? What is least confusing/most clear about our intentions here?

Categories : once we pick nomenclature, can tag them as belonging to the various "lego blocks" or whatever. can tag all of the recently edited ones differently than the mass of old ones?? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories

What to do with all the old, dead pages? originally it was not clear to me that we can/should delete all of them. since they still come up when you search on the wiki, we need to do something smart with them... e.g. delete most of them.