In 1996, we received 16 applications. Awards by our Grants Committee, totaling $15,285, were as follows (principal investigator indicated in parentheses):

1. McLennan Labs of the University of Toronto (Chigurupati Murali). $2,250 for the purchase of a tape drive for online and archival storage of data from a study of satellite remnants in order to establish a theoretical basis for interpreting observations of a substructure in the Galactic halo. The proposed investigation will involve numerical calculations and will benefit from the acquisition of additional digital storage media.

2. Agnes Scott College (Christopher G. De Pree). $2,410 for the purchase of a 220 MHz class Pentium computer that will be used to increase the computing resources for the observation, recordation and analysis of a large number of sources and/or a single source of various Galactic star forming regions in order to locate objects at different evolutionary stages which need to be linked into an evolutionary model.

3. A. J. Dyer Observatory at Vanderbilt University (Douglas S. Hall). $2,500 toward the purchase of a low-end SUN workstation to be used for the management and operation of a 16-inch automated photoelectric telescope (APT). The SUN workstation will ultimately facilitate analysis of real-time and post-processing data sets for the development of a 30-inch APT for use by various teams of research-active astronomers.

4. University of Central Florida (Nadine G. Barlow). $2,500 toward the purchase of a 1534 X 1020 pixel array charge coupled device (CCD) camera to be used in conjunction with an 0.66-meter (26 inch) Schmidt-Cassegrain reflecting telescope for long-term ongoing research programs for both planetary and stellar observations. The Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope will, in addition, be available to astronomers at the University of Arizona for the study of asteroid and planetary occultations.

5. University of Washington (Vikram V. Dwarkadas). $2,500 for the purchase of a 9 Gb disk drive to store the voluminous output that is generated by high-resolution hydrodymanic numerical simulations, as well as the myriad observations with which they will be compared. The high-resolution simulations will also aid in the study and observation of planetary nebulae which have revealed previously unresolved intricate small-scale structures.

6. San Diego State University (Grant J. Miller). $1,925 for the purchase of a large capacity (9 Gb) external hard drive for use in connection with a Sun Sparc20 image processing system for the support of a comprehensive survey of ring nebulae around Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars. Images will be obtained of all Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars visible from the Mount Laguna Observatory 1-meter reflector. Observations of standard stars will be included for the purpose of flux calibration.

7. Carnegie Observatories (Carme Gallart). $1,200 for the purchase of a 4 Gb external hard drive to be used for the study of the stellar populations in the four dwarf elliptical Andromeda Galaxy companions, with the aim of solving a long-lasting question about the distribution of stellar ages in these galaxies. The study will, in addition, provide definitive constraints on the age of the Andromeda Galaxy stars and will clarify the nature of the luminous asymptotic giant branch stars.