Students explore stars through Harvard, Smithsonian project

The junior high students at Tuscarawas Central Catholic Jr./Sr. High School participated in a research project with Harvard and the Smithsonian this quarter to understand planets, stars and galaxies by selecting and taking images through digital telescopes.

The scientific-grade tools include a micro-observatory using a robotic telescope network and a JS9-4-L imager. The digital telescopes are named after famous scientists and are in Arizona, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chile. The telescopes take requested images through a portal sponsored by the Youth Astronomy Network with the Center for Astrophysics, located at Harvard and the Smithsonian.

YouthAstroNet experts gather data in real time from student pre- and post-surveys to help students navigate pixels, math, science and STEM concepts about astronomy. In many cases, this is the first time students have taken a serious look at the planets, stars and nebulas that surround Earth’s orbit.

Students at the school also participated in a NASA “Passport to the Moon” program to help them understand how they can become aware of careers in space and follow the path of the recent Artemis II mission.

Student Ameila Ball said, “I like these projects and being able to choose the planets and stars and what you want to discover about them.”

Carson Fisher said, “It does interest me how high of detail or resolution is of the pictures and images given that the stars and planets are so far away.”

The students request, wait 24 hours and view the images using the JS9-4L imager, where they can navigate the pixels, scale, brightness and color of the image.

A grant was given to science teacher Sonya Paul to help students establish several goals around the topic of astrophotography. These goals include helping students understand that the sky belongs to everyone, that people are scientists in different ways and that they can connect what they learn from the stars, planets and galaxies to future scientific endeavors.

It also can be a family activity to watch the stars and planet alignments.

“In fact, I encourage the kids to go home and talk to their families about the current views of astronomy — what stars are in the night sky or position of the moon,” Paul said.

For example, the junior high students took images from Earth of the moon while the Artemis II astronauts were taking astrophotography images of Earth from the moon. According to Paul, “the idea and the process of imaging using colors and filters, along with shutter speed of an image is the same.”

The students are “in essence doing the same tasks the astronauts are doing just from a different perspective.”

The study and research the students are doing will translate into a capstone project that other students in the school will enjoy.

Seventh-grade student Eddy Quinilla-Morales said, “I love the color and how we can make the image clearer.”

The students were focused on taking images, using filters and colorization, including logging to scale a specific planet, star, galaxy or nebula.

Ball said, “It’s one way to keep class really interesting.”