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High school student helps launch internet telescope

If most high school students ever get to see the Horsehead Nebula, it’s by looking at a book, or a
slide in science class.

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

But thanks to a telescope network spearheaded in part by a Pennsylvania youth, students from
across the country now can view the nebula and countless other formations from any
internet-connected computer.

Schuylkill Valley High School sophomore Ryan Hannahoe punches coordinates on a keyboard, and
waits a few moments for a telescope under crystal-clear New Mexico skies to swing toward the
dramatic dust cloud marked on astronomical charts as M33.

Back in Pennsylvania, where lights from Leesport and nearby Reading would make such observing
impossible, Hannahoe keys in commands to set the telescope’s digital camera for a 200-second
exposure. Fifteen exposures later, he has downloaded enough data to create a magazine-quality
image of the horse-like formation in the constellation Orion.

Hannahoe made the picture of one of amateur astronomers’ favorite targets by remote control,
1,500 miles from the telescope site in the Southwest, via a Student Telescope Network he has
helped to create.

“This is a big move for amateur astronomy,” said Hannahoe, 16, chairman of the Youth Activity
Committee of the Astronomical League, a national coalition of astronomy groups. “Amateur
astronomy is dying because of light pollution. There are not that many kids involved.”

“The typical school has nothing at all, they look at a picture in a book. The labs that we do, they’re
on paper,” he said. “Here, we’re taking a picture and doing actual research, which is really cool,
basically learning to be an astronomer.”

The students are learning to observe the way professional astronomers in search of dark skies
often do, using automated facilities built in remote corners of the earth or, in the case of the Hubble
telescope, in space.

Hannahoe worked with professor Robert Stencel at the University of Denver, the Software Bisque
astronomy software company, and the New Mexico Skies astronomy resort to develop the student
network.

In a pilot project that started in February, about 500 student groups from the United States, Canada,
Mexico, and as far away as Australia and China have used it, he said.

Software Bisque, in Golden, Colo., developer of astronomy software and a robotic telescope
system, has been working with New Mexico Skies to create a remote telescope network to lease
observing time to institutions such as universities and community colleges for astronomy teaching,
as well as to amateur astronomers on an hourly basis.

Mike Rice, owner of New Mexico Skies, said the service will be especially valuable for schools in
urban areas with skies too brightly lit for observatories to function. Meanwhile, Stencel helped
obtain a grant to connect one telescope at the resort to the free network for high-school students
in a pilot project lasting from February to May.

“Ryan and I over the past two to three years have been conspiring about ways to get more young
people more access to telescopes,” said the professor, familiar with Hannahoe from Astronomical
League activities.

“A lot of students have trouble seeing a constellation, let alone an object such as a galaxy. In big
cities, light pollution can be a big issue,” Stencel said. He added, “It sure is great to be able to
observe from the comfort of an office rather than being up on the roof freezing.”

Rice said New Mexico Skies is far away from big city lights: 100 miles north of El Paso, 160 miles
south of Albuquerque, 16 miles from Cloudcroft, N.M., population 592, “with a mountain range in
between,” and three miles from Mayhill, N.M., population nine.

“There are not shopping centers in Mayhill,” he said. “We have a very dark location with pristine
skies … and 260 clear nights a year. You see the center of our galaxy—the summer Milky
Way—and more stars than you’ve ever seen in your life.”

Wherever they live, young astronomers can log on to the student network, view a star chart, type
in the name or coordinates of M31, the Andromeda galaxy next to ours; M33, the Pinwheel Galaxy;
M51, a dramatic swirl of two galaxies, or any area they want.

The Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with 14-inch mirror tracks on its robotic mount; the
state-of-the-art, charge-coupled device digital camera, with its extremely light-sensitive 11/2-inch
square computer chip, senses the image; and the student downloads the digital image at home.

The network is the latest of many projects for Hannahoe, who said his curiosity about astronomy
was fired by dramatic photos of pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet fragments crashing into
Jupiter in 1994. As a child, he said, “I thought, ‘How can I do this? How far is that? And can we
travel there?’”

He’s been making telescopes since age 13, and belongs to seven astronomy groups including the
Schuylkill Valley Youth Astronomers, which he founded, and the Berks County Amateur
Astronomical Society.

Hannahoe downloaded the first brilliant test images from the New Mexico Skies telescope in
January on the PC in a spare bedroom at his home.

“It was Friday, Jan. 11, at 11 p.m. EST. It was like, ‘Yes!’” he said.

Stencel is increasingly busy coordinating the use of the network, granting two-hour blocks to
students who register on the web site. He said grants will be sought to continue and expand the
network when the pilot project money runs out.

Hannahoe said he would like to add a dozen telescopes at New Mexico Skies, one in the mountains
of Bolivia in clear seeing conditions at 17,000 feet, and one in Australia to the network.

Gary Becker, director of the Allentown, Pa., School District’s planetarium, has had student
enthusiasts join him for nighttime sessions on the telescope network, sometimes until midnight.

By providing nighttime images during daytime in the Western hemisphere, Becker said, “The
instrument in Australia is going to allow us in North America to use the Student Telescope Network
as an in-school device.”

Possible student projects include observing the “light curves” of asteroids, the changing brilliance
of reflected light that lets observers calculate the speed and direction of an asteroid’s spin, Becker
and Hannahoe said.

Just inside Hannahoe’s front door is an instrument that won him a prize at a telescope-builder’s
event, a 6-foot shining black fiberglass tube with a 10-inch mirror and aluminum fittings cradled on a
wooden stand.

At night, Hannahoe and his friends often take it out in his hilltop yard overlooking Leesport, on the
Schuylkill River 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia, to do some observing.

Lately, he said, “I use the internet telescope more.”

Links:

Student Telescope Network
http://www.youthinastronomy.org

New Mexico Skies
http://www.nmskies.com

Software Bisque
http://www.bisque.com

http://www.eschoolnews.org/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=3596

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