Community Overview

The Fairborn Institute was key in the formation of several institutions and has worked closely with them over the years. These include the Institute for Student Astronomical Research which supports published student research, offers research seminars for students, and fosters student participation in conferences and workshops. It also includes the Alt-Az Initiative for the development of small research telescopes and associated instrumentation. Various Institute members have attended most of the in-person annual Alt-Az Initiative workshops held for the past 14 years in late July in Portland, Oregon. Institute staff and students have also participated in the annual symposia of the Society for Astronomical Sciences for the past two decades. The SAS symposia are currently held in mid-spring in Ontario, California. Finally, the Fairborn Institute has supported the Journal of Double Star Observations (JDSO) for many years with many student coauthored papers submitted for publication, and by reviewing other papers and soliciting new papers for publication.

The Fairborn Observatory organized ten annual 1980s workshops, many held at the Lazy-K-Bar Guest Ranch in February, that were key in advancing the development of robotic telescopes and observatories.

While most of the Alt-Az Initiative workshops were held in Portland, Oregon, this one was held at Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope headquarters on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The Fairborn Institute organized the 2009 Galileo’s Legacy workshop, held on Oahu, that featured small telescope research and development initiatives.

The CubeSat Astronomy in the 2020s workshop at the 2020 AAS Honolulu meeting, was organized by Fairborn Institute staff and featured a number of talks by high school and undergraduate students.

Rachel Freed, President of the Institute for Student Astronomical Research (InStAR) which is supported by the Fairborn Institute. See www.In4StAR.org

The Fairborn Institute has supported Boyce-Astro (www.Boyce-Astro.org) for many years. Here Pat Boyce, the founder of Boyc-Astro, along with Grady Boyce, helps a student with his double star research. Besides double star astronomy, Boyce-Astro supports exoplanet research.

Boyce-Astro has organized and manages the largest student Astronomy Research Seminar program in the country. Focused on the San Diego area, it involves students from a number of area high schools and community colleges, as well as advanced amateur astronomers from the San Diego Astronomical Society.

The Fairborn Institute has worked with the Great Basin Observatory—especially with its Concordia University and Southern Utah University members. GBO features a PlaneWave Instruments CDK-17 telescope that is instrumented, among other things, for speckle interferometry.