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MESA Club at Dos Pueblos learns Agent Exoplanet

Nov 17, 2012

On Thursday November 15 I visited the MESA Club at  Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, CA. This visit was arranged through a fantastic program called Santa Barbara Partners in Education that, among other activities, links schools with professionals in the community who want to donate their time. The acronym MESA stands for math, science, and engineering acheivement, and the club at Dos Pueblos has about 20 members. The students are all interested in science, and they wanted a hands-on demonstration about astronomy. I decided to have them use LCOGT's citizen science project, Agent Exoplanet. As an introduction we had a brief discussion about exoplanets, why they are scientifically important to find, the type of data that is required, and how it is analyzed. Then, the students dug in! We only had 45 minutes, but I was very impressed by how quickly these MESA Club students caught on to the technique of relative photometry.