California State Summer School for Math and Science (COSMOS) is a month-long residential program for high school students who have demonstrated exceptional talent in math and science. COSMOS programs are run each summer at four University of California campuses: Irvine, Santa Cruz, Davis and San Diego. We have taught the Astronomy & Astrophysics cluster of classes here at UC Irvine each summer since the program's inception in 2000. Pictured above are the twenty students in the A&A Cluster from Summer 2008 on their first night at the UCI Observatory. Resident Assistant Elka Macknicki is on the far left. 

The teaching staff for the Astronomy & Astrophysics Cluster in Summer 2008 consists of Professor James Bullock and Tammy Smecker-Hane. Teaching Assistants include graduate students Michael Hood and Carol Thornton and postdoctoral researcher Rachel Kuzio de Naray. Our Teacher Fellow is Sean Fletcher of Laguna Hills High School.

In addition to attending lectures on Astronomy, Astrophysics and Scientific Communication and doing CLEA astronomy labs in the computer lab, students get to perform individual research projects with the UCI Observatory.  Some of the fruits of their many treks to the Observatory are shown below. In addition to planning and executing their observations, the students also learned how to operate the observatory, which included opening and closing the observatory, moving and tracking with the telescope, and controlling the CCD camera and spectrograph, and keeping records of all of their observations in the Observatory logbook.  The students also became familiar with data reduction and analysis software used by professional astronomers such as IRAF, DAOPHOT and IDL.  These analysis packages were used to reduce the CCD images, perform aperature and profile-fitting photometry of stars in clusters,  analyze spectra of the Ring Nebula, and classify spectra of different types of main sequence stars, identify asteriods, etc.

• The Ring Nebula -  This is a true-color image of M57, commonly called the Ring Nebula, which is a planetary nebula created when a dying star (the blue-colored star seen at the center of the ring) ejects its outer layers, creating a shell of gas that grows larger with time, and leaves behind a white dwarf star. It is a combination of a few minutes exposures in B, V and R (blue, green and red) filters taken with the ST9 CCD by the Star Cluster M11 group in Summer 2006. 
  
• Galaxy Group 2000 - This is a 180-second view of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, using the R-band filter.  In addition to the central bulge of the galaxy, the spiral arms are clearly visible along with several foreground stars.
• Galaxy Group 2002 -  This is the average of three 5 min exposures of the spiral galaxy NGC 6946 using the V-band filter. Unfortunately, the contrast between the galaxy and sky is low because the Full Moon was shining brightly.
• Star Cluster Group 2002 - performed photometry of the star clusters M11, an open cluster, and M13, a globular cluster, which they found had very different ages and distances.