Cabanela Research

Astrophysics Research

This is a list of posters and other resources that I have placed online that may be of interest. My publications are not listed here, instead they are on my CV, which is available online here.

Research-Related Software Projects and Products

• The "Mapping the Asymmetric Thick Disk" Project: This is a summary of our collaboration's work on determining the nature of the asymmetry in star counts in the Thick Disk of our Galaxy as well as the data products from that project.
  
  
• External SPECROAD (What is it? | Installation | User's Guide): This is a version of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's SPECROAD data reduction pipeline used to reduce Hectospec data, re-worked to run on non-SAO computers. This version of the scripts should run on MacOS X or Linux once you have followed the installation instructions.
  
  
• The MAPS Catalog: To aid in my research and those of other astronomers, I wave heavily involved in developing an interactive version of the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner Catalog of the POSS I. This catalog of more than 89 million objects visible from the Northern hemisphere goes roughly 1 million times fainter than the human eye can see (and deeper than modern telescopes less than 0.5 meters in size) and covers over 2 times the area of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
  
  

Individual Research Projects

• The Distribution of LSBs in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster (Cabanela and Roscioli 2003): Our AAS poster on the first investigation of the distribution of low surface brightness galaxies in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster.
  
  
• Galaxies on the Blue Edge (Cabanela and Dickey 2002, AJ, 124, 78): A paper on the identification of LSBs on the Palomar Sky Survey using simpleselection criteria.
  
  
• Deep CO Observations of Four LSBs (Cabanela, Womack, and Dickey 2002): Our AAS poster on the search for molecular gas in LSBs... net result, no such gas was found.
  
  
• A Successful Automated Search for Crouching Giants (Cabanela and Dickey 2001): Our AAS poster on HI observations of LSB candidates selected from the POSS I. NOTE: A much better supported model for the "blueness" of LSBs on the POSS I has now been published as Cabanela and Dickey (2002).
  
  
• Accessing, Mining, and Archiving an Online Database: The APS Catalog of the POSS I (Humphreys, Cabanela, and Kiessler 2001): Our AAS poster describing the basics of the APS Catalog and how we will go about archiving it for distribution to the community.
  
  
• The MAPS-NGP Catalog : A catalog of over 200,000 galaxies near the North Galactic Pole from my Ph.D. Thesis.
  
  
• My 1999 Ph.D. Thesis on the statistical properties of galaxies on the POSS I.

Astronomy Education Research

So What IS the Astronomy Major?

One of the fundamental questions we can ask as astronomers is just what are requiring of the udnergraduate astronomy students we hope will eventually follow in our footsteps. At the 199th meeting of the AAS in January 2002, Bruce Partridge and I presented the preliminary results [Abstract] of our investigation of the undergraduate astronomy major in the United States. This investigation consisted of an examination of the classes required for the major at 61 U.S. institutions offering the undergraduate astronomy degree (according to the AIP September 2001 Roster of Astronomy Degrees).

The results of our review of the astronomy major have since been published in the Astronomy Education Review in a paper entitled "So What IS the Astronomy Major?" (link to article). I am also providing a local PDF draft version which I think is more nicely formated.

• A Microsoft Excel data table listing the courses required for the astronomy major at all the institutions reviewed in Cabanela and Partridge (2002) including sources of information (requires Microsoft Excel 2000 or more recent). We welcome feedback on any errors or inaccuracies you see in this data as it pertains to your schools.