Collaborative: The CONCAM Undergraduate Education Project

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There is no substitute for exposure to real observations of astronomical phenomena. Most students, however, are either unfamiliar with the night sky or familiar only with a night sky that is severely compromised by city lights. Planetarium software, while useful, provides an artificial and synthetic experience. A global network of fisheye night-sky web cameras, the CONCAMs, has developed recently, and it takes real and continuous images of the entire night sky. These images, freely available over the web, can be used to demonstrate clearly and forcefully many basic scientific concepts in introductory astronomy. This project is developing the CONCAM Undergraduate Education Project that leverages CONCAM images to teach a variety of astronomical concepts to undergraduates. As part of this initiative the project is developing modules that supplement standard introductory textbooks with real all-sky images from http://concam.net . This is a Proof of Concept project during which two prototype modules are being developed and evaluated