ABSTRACT - BARSONY A Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Engineering (POWRE)award will support an 18-month Visiting Professorship at the Physics Department at Harvey Mudd College. This award will allow a full time collaboration with Prof. Alex Rudolph to develop the Claremont-Riverside InfraRed CAMera (CLRIRCAM-pronounced "clearer cam") project. The visit will start in January of 1998. Harvey Mudd College is one of the Claremont Colleges, a group of five small colleges located in Claremont, California. Pomona College, the oldest and largest of the five, owns a 1.0-meter telescope, whose use is shared among the five colleges. A three-year collaboration with Dr. Rudolph involves the acquisition of a near-infrared array camera for this telescope. The POWRE Visiting Professorship at Harvey Mudd College will be spent developing the design specifications for the camera, developing software for data acquisition-including an efficient mosaicing mode, integrating the camera control software with the telescope control software, developing an efficient data archiving system using writeable CD-ROMs, and developing IDL data reduction routines for photometry, astrometry, mosaicing, and re-scaling and combining of multi-color images. Well-documented software, and student manuals on the use of the telescope, the instrument, and on the correct steps for data-taking and data reduction with CLRIRCAM will be produced. The Pomona College 1.0-meter telescope is a superb instrument for the CLRIRCAM project. It is located at Table Mountain Observatory, a high, dry site, at an altitude of 7200 feet, on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains away from the lights of the Los Angeles basin, making it ideal for near-infrared observations. CLRIRCAM will open up astronomical research opportunities for an entire community, including faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates from each of the six collaborating institutions. The research plans usi ng CLRIRCAM include systematic large-area multi-color imaging surveys of dark, interstellar molecular clouds to study embedded young stars and star clusters, the search for the youngest protostars, and frequent and long-term monitoring projects of variable young stellar objects (YSOs) to elucidate infall, outflow, and disk accretion mechanisms. The YSO monitoring projects have the potential to lead to new breakthroughs in our understanding of fundamental physics relating to the gas motions in the immediate circumstellar environments of young stars, that may also shed some light on planet formation scenarios.
