Category: astronomy 341

  • Week 13: the once and future researcher

    Week 13: the once and future researcher

    We’ve presented, and thus our journey has come to a close. The digital poster presentation Last Wednesday about 60+ astronomers loaded into a zoom call. They were serenaded by smooth jazz during interstitials and distant shouts, heavy breathing, and keyboard clacking throughout. It went off with so many hitches, but it happened none the less.…

  • Week 12: proof of variation

    Week 12: proof of variation

    In quarantine, it doesn’t seem like a lot changes day-to-day. The second part of this blog addresses how I used the linmix package to prove that our TESS-S21 field M-dwarf targets exhibit H-alpha, even in their old age. To begin, however, I’ll address a bunch of changes/improvements/revelations I made to our periodograms and period fitting.…

  • Week 11: Stumbling towards the finish line

    Week 11: Stumbling towards the finish line

    The longer I stare at periodigrams the less I know. Knowledge drains from out my ears like water from a leaky faucet; my sanity drops like the price of oil (and good riddance, the world doesn’t need either). Lena and I have divided our analysis work among ourselves by field, with me taking command of…

  • Week 10: nearing conclusions

    Week 10: nearing conclusions

    This week I felt like I didn’t really accomplish anything. I’m sick and my whole body hurts, and there’s the whole global pandemic while I’m trying to figure out summer internships. I tried to get photometry to work for the binary targets in our Taurus subfield, but I couldn’t get our algorithm to treat the…

  • Week 9: pythons in the grass

    Week 9: pythons in the grass

    This week we set to work performing differential photometry (as outlined in previous posts) using python, as opposed to AIJ. Our python photometry allows us easier access to the data and is more automated than using AIJ, meaning we can more easily standardize our procedure. I then made a periodigram from our Ha fluxes in…

  • Week 8: curve comparison

    Week 8: curve comparison

    This week we were tasked with generating light curves for the targets in our images and writing an annotated bibliography for a paper we were assigned in groups. My group was assigned “Accretion in low-mass members of the Orion Nebula Cluster with young transition disks” (de Albuquerque et al. 2020). Taurus field light curves We…