As I describe over at the grant criteria web-page I am interested in supporting three general areas: education, smaller telescopes, and novel systems. The existing grants reflect all of these.
This is a one-year grant to enable all the 5th grade classes in the Flagstaff school system to visit Lowell for a day of adventure and education.
We have called this an IYA experiment. Depending on how it works out, it might turn into a repeating grant.
I noticed that the Art Museum where I live had "first Tuesday of the month free" days sponsored by local businesses. The model seemed good: the public can enter for free while the sponsoring company gets publicity via "This Free Tuesday brought to you by ..." signs and announcements.
We are trying this out at Lowell Observatory. The Sciences Fund is providing seed funding for a sequence of one-per-month "free Sundays". We are publicising the events, and pointing out the "opportunity" to the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce. The goal is that the event becomes supported within the Flagstaff business community.
See, for example, this article in the Lowell Observatory blog.
The privately-owned Bareket Observatory in Israel is providing community education and outreach in astronomy and science.
The Sciences Fund is indirectly supporting them as they build educational web-pages in Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian to popularize astronomy and science within their community.
This was the first grant of the Sciences Fund, and (currently) by far the largest. It is discussed at some length at this web-page
This grant works with the PROMPT telescope consortium, based at UNC Chapel Hill, to make the consortium's robotic telescopes in Chile available to researchers and educators.
To learn more, visit the PROMPT website and examine the proposal form.
This is a repeating grant.
This grant funds the hardware costs of an AAVSO project to create "APASS", a homogeneous whole-sky photometric survey in five bandpasses down to magnitude 17.
This multi-year project is in the process of acquiring equipment.