Educational activities

Basically as a regular feature we have had various observing courses during the ``summer'' semester. We especially have been extensively involved with the Nordic-Baltic Research Training Course ``Young Stars across Time and Wavelength'' that took place at Tuorla Observatory, Turku, Finland, during the period 6-16 June 2011. The course was organised jointly by the NOT, StarPlan (Denmark), Onsala Space Observatory (Sweden), and Tuorla Observatory, with financial support from NordForsk. As during the previous NordForsk training courses, the NOT was used in remote mode. See for details about the course

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

The NOT was also used in remote mode as part of the 9$^{th}$ NEON Observing School that took 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 had 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).

On La Palma we are involved in an observatory wide program to reach all 15 year-old pupils on La Palma. This program includes an astronomy talk (in Spanish) at the schools plus a daytime visit to the observatory with a small astronomy workshop and visits to the telescope(s).

For the students at the NOT a more indepth course was provided in the use of the FIESTool reduction package. It was noted on a few occasion that the basic knowledge of Linux is missing among the students and among some of the younger observers. This is actually an issue in the use of our observing system as it runs under Linux. To provide a minimal basis for the proper use of the observing system a web page is set-up with a short description and a basic list of commands.