Robert Patterson - US grants

This award will allow the Principal Investigator to upgrade the positioning and guidance system of the Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU) Baker Observatory 0.4-m Cassegrain reflecting telescope. This telescope was one of the first instruments used at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO). It was obtained from CTIO by SMSU in 1983 on a long-term, renewable loan basis. The telescope was installed at Baker Observatory in 1984, and although the optical system is still quite satisfactory, the positioning and guidance system is in need of modernization. This award provides funds to purchase a computer-controlled closed-loop stepping motor positioning system and a remote guiding system. These will allow rapid and accurate positioning and precise guiding of the telescope. This will permit efficient use with existing instrumentation, which consists of an automated-filter photometer and a CCD imaging system. The scientific programs to be carried out with these instruments include high precision photoelectric and CCD camera photometry of variable stars, standard stars, and bright galaxies.

The NSFNET infrastructure has expanded at an exponential rate and has precipitated the need to evaluate trends that impact future network development. High performance computing and advanced 3- dimensional graphics environment coupled with new media technologies provides an expanded visual domain to represent and study complex network topology and data. This project will organize, aggregate, reduce, and investigate large network databases while considering a design criteria that can be applied to a more diverse set of information flow problems. This study is a major step in the development, visualization, and investigation of network data archives and can reveal communication trends in the nsfnet and its components. The archiving and distribution of this investigation will provide a valuable national resource and has the potential of becoming a general purpose visualization tool for network analysis.

9315061 Wolf The knowledge of many basic stellar properties is dependent on studies of variable stars. Two classes of variable stars, eclipsing binaries and yellow supergiants will be studied in this project. Photometry measurements will be made with CCD on the Baker Observatory 0.4 meter telescope at Southwestern Missouri State University. Light curves will be obtained for poorly studied eclipsing binaries and eclipses sought in suspected eclipsing binaries. Many yellow supergiants may vary at low levels and a sample of these stars will be observed to search for such variations.

This project will enable computational scientists to temporally and spatially manage, navigate, and document large, multi-dimensional datasets using advanced virtual reality (VR) technologies.

The primary objectives are to:

Research and develop a spatially and temporally-based VR software Application Manager, coupled with a generalized navigation and interactive recording applications programming interface (API), for use with CAVE, ImmersaDesk, and Infinity Wall applications

Enable scientists to mange, navigate, and document interactive VR explorations in realtime and then re-render the simulation data at higher resolution in non-real time; this will provide researchers with a better understanding of their science, as well as provide video-based educational materials

Disseminate information to the national scientific community using educational materials developed with these advanced VR technologies

Science and engineering researchers attempt to solve complex problems by first probing the data to discover underlying principles, and then documenting the results so they can be reproduced by the research community. Three-dimensional VR displays provide a far more powerful interface for data exploration that the two-dimensional workstation screen. The importance of real-time VR navigational recording and playback is twofold: (1) it provides and efficient mechanism to store navigational data for subsequent renderings of full-resolution simulations; and (2) it supports asynchronous collaboration among networked VR remote sites.

This project software will also link to network communication libraries to enable CAVE-to-CAVE recording mechanisms-the key to supporting asynchronous collaboration. Funds are sought to support graduate students and summer faculty research.