For the last 17 years, Dr. Daniel Reichart (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and a small group of radio astronomy educators from across the country, have taken 15 mostly undergraduate students but also a few high school students and occasionally a member of the general public on a unique, intense, one-week workshop at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia called "Educational Research in Radio Astronomy" (ERIRA). Most astronomy programs do not teach radio astronomy, at least not in an observational or laboratory setting. This is primarily due to the prohibitive cost of building, operating, and maintaining sufficiently large radio telescopes, thus the need for ERIRA. Under this award, Dr. Reichart and his team will continue ERIRA for three summers as both a workshop in radio astronomy and in optical astronomy as well. The optical astronomy aspects are based on the development of the Skynet Robotic Telescope Network and the Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes (PROMPT) telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
Radio astronomy is a wonderful teaching tool. Unlike optical astronomy, it can be done during the day when students are naturally awake, and it can be done through most weather conditions. Furthermore, coupled with optical astronomy it makes a powerful teaching package - fostering a better understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum and the important role that multi-wavelength observations play in 21st-century astronomy. Furthermore, it exposes students to a wide range of astrophysical phenomena - solar system objects, star-forming regions, supernova remnants, galaxies, quasars - and a wide range of emission processes - blackbody, synchrotron, bremsstrahlung, radio and optical emission lines - in ways that are fundamentally different than when they are experienced in only one waveband or the other.
