In 2007 we received 14 applications. Awards by our Grants Committee totaling $16,584 were as follows (principal investigator indicated in parentheses):

1. Custer Institute and Observatory (Jeffrey Owen Katz). $2,888 for the purchase of CCD imaging equipment to support projects, including the search for extrasolar planets, supernova searches, and photometry of sun-like stars.

2. Furman University, Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (David Moffett). $1,149 for acquisition of a Pulsar Data Acquisition System. The F.A.R. gratefully acknowledges the donation by the Institute for Space Observations of the funds for this grant.

3. University of Denver (Jennifer L. Hoffman). $3,000 to transport the HPOL spectropolarimeter to a new observatory and install it there as part of a larger project to revive this instrument and allow all U.S. astronomers access to the data it collects.

4. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (Gaurav Khanna). $3,000 purchase a high-end multicore computer workstation which will be used to simulate the evolution of an astrophysical event that commonly occurs in the nuclei of most galaxies, i.e. the capture of a small star (or black hole) by a super massive black hole. These simulations will generate “waveforms” of gravitational wave patterns that will be of immediate use to the various gravitational wave observatories that are being built all over the world (LIGO, GEO, VIRGO, TAMA, etc.) to be used by several researchers at University of Alabama, MIT and University of Massachusetts, that are part of this collaborative project.

5. Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (W. Bruce Weaver). $4,850 for a partial funding for an upgrade to a CCD camera used in the photometric and spectroscopic search for T Tauri stars.

6. Morehead State University (Jennifer J. Birriel). $1,697 to purchase equipment to develop a system capable of photometric and spectroscopic monitoring of a variety of variable stars.