Before the renaissance, astronomy was essentially a visual science later these visual concepts were related to physical theories, most notably Kepler's laws of orbital motion of the planets and Newton's laws of gravity. Today, observations and theoretical explanations of observed phenomena are deeply intertwined. In undergraduate astronomy education, it is important to teach both the observational aspects of astronomy and the underlying physics these observations illustrate. Although, carefully drawn diagrams, such as those in textbooks, illuminate some astrophysical concepts they do not allow students to recreate the discovery process of astronomy research. Retracing the steps that astronomers took to understand particular observed phenomena facilitates understanding an astrophysical principle. Our goal is to develop tools that faculty can use to create challenging and fun exercises for their students involving analysis of astronomical data. These tools are not limited to use in astronomy, however the strong role of visual analysis in astronomy makes it an excellent field for our initial deployment.

Astronomers routinely use specialized software to analyze their images; the software is usually customized for particular telescopes (e.g., Hubble Space Telescope), wavelength ranges (e.g., radio wavelengths), and sometimes physical processes (e.g., hydrodynamics). Due to the complexity and specificity of such software, it would be impractical and counter-productive to give introductory students problems requiring its use. Instructors require a software system that can be used on various computer platforms. We have developed a client/server system in which the professional astronomical tools run on a large server and the user interacts with the system using a web client. This client/server architecture gives students the ability to use the same astronomical data analysis packages as research astronomers. Students are presented only the subset of the functionality necessary to carry out the homework assignment.