In this paper, a robotic telescope-centric high-school level astronomy education project, Our Solar Siblings (OSS) is outlined. The project, an LCO official education partner, was formed as an institution-independent non-profit collaboration of volunteers officially in 2014, although the first version of the curriculum materials and approach was initially first designed in 2010. We outline the five goals of the project and the three approaches (formal classroom, independent student research and providing support to similar endeavours) we implement to pursue these goals. The curriculum materials, a central part of the project, are outlined as are their connections to various curriculum. The independent research project aspect and recent activity is presented. The article concludes with a brief update on the OSS evaluation which drives the educational design and the project's future directions as of 2017.
Exoplanets have become a very active focus of research in the past few years. This is especially true now as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched in April of 2018 and is expected to find thousands of potential candidate exoplanets every year, with the expectation that students and pro-ams will undertake much of the follow-up work. This paper presents a worked example for those intending to get started with observing exoplanets. We analyzed the transit of the planet HAT P-56 b utilizing data from Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) Telescopes and two python scripts. One of the scripts, Exorequest, assists with planning the transit observation while the other, astrosource, automates much of the photometric processing of the transit. While this method uses the LCO data and scheduler, this method will work with any typical optical images.
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