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February, 2004

Dear GAVRT Teachers!

Happy 2004! We have an exciting opportunity to share with you. We are launching brand new campaign focusing on the study of quasars. This initial campaign is entitled QVS-The Northern Spring Campaign: “A Search for Blinking Black Holes!”. We are conducting a study of six variable quasars under the direction of renowned Australian scientist, Dr. David Jauncey, and in coordination with Dr. Hayley Bignall, who is our Primary Investigator with the Nançay Radio Telescope (NRT), in Nançay, France. This is the initial campaign in a continuing series of studies focusing on quasars and encompassing a number of wavelengths and collaborations. This new campaign will begin on February 23rd and run through April 9th. The purpose of this campaign is to investigate refractive interstellar scintillation timescales of these sources, which have all been observed to exhibit large intra-day variations. GAVRT can provide extremely valuable data at both x and s-band frequencies, which fall in-between the microwave frequencies that will be observed at the NRT in France.


Do you have an interest in observing black holes? Would you like to excite and involve your students in collaborating with an international team of scientists? We hope so! You may sign up at www.gavrt.org. Select ‘GAVRT Team Members’ from the column on the right. You will notice, on our online antenna schedule, the antenna sessions are now differentiated into ‘JQ Request’ (for Jupiter Quest sessions) and ‘New QVS Requests’ for this new campaign. Make your selection online, and we will confirm with you your scheduled time.


In addition, we are giving you a CD with updated GAVRT materials that relate to this particular project. It has explanations of our much easier VNC (virtual network connection) method of connecting to us in Mission Control as well as information on conducting Cross Scans. You may also print any of our regular Jupiter Quest curriculum lessons from our web page.


We are looking forward to your participation and trust you are able to take advantage of this opportunity. We hope to hear from you soon.


Take care,

David MacLaren, Director, Educational Research & Development, dmaclaren@lcer.org

Kim Bunnell, Manager, Global Operations, kbunnell@lcer.org