Educational activities

We have been extensively involved with organising and preparing for the Nordic-Baltic Research Training Course ``Young Stars across Time and Wavelength'' that will take place at Tuorla Observatory, Turku, Finland, during the period 6-16 June 2011. The course is organised jointly by the NOT, StarPlan (Denmark), Onsala Space Observatory (Sweden), and Tuorla Observatory, with financial support from NordForsk,

http://www.not.iac.es/Turku2011/ .

During the school the NOT will be used in remote mode as during the previous NordForsk training courses.

The NOT will also be used in remote mode as part of the 9$^{th}$ NEON Observing School that will take place at the Moletai Observatory, Lithuania, during the period 14 -27 July 2011, see

http://www.iap.fr/neon/neon_schools/2011/MoletaiProgram2011.html .

We also will have the regular on-site observing courses for the Stockholm University (5 nights in May) and the master school in CUO/NBI guaranteed time (3 nights in August).

A general issue we have noted in the training of our students at the telescope is that with the increased automation of observing it is harder to get a deeper, more complete understanding of the whole process of observing. This is especially relevant when visiting astronomers have questions about their observing strategy or if one needs to identify problems properly. To improvement the understanding of the observing system we have set-up a list of procedures defined in existing observing scripts and started a program in which students have to execute these procedures in manually mode when they are being trained at the telescope.

As part of a collaboration with the ING started by our former NordForsk post-doc Raine Karjalainen (who now works at the ING) on various occasions students from the ING joined our students at the telescope during technical nights, and our students joined the students at the INT to get a broader perspective of telescopes and observing.