Category: astronomy 341

Now that society has collapsed, I finally have had some time to read some papers. We’ll get to that later in this post, but first I’ll review some small changes to my pipeline, our group’s intended schedule for pipeline convergence, an additional lightcurve I made, and some notes on two resources our adviser asked us…

Amherst College may be self-destructing over the novel COVID-19, but the stars move in the heavens, and so my work continues. One last proposition: This past week we submitted our proposals (fingers crossed) and learned how to use a program, AstroImageJ, to create light curves from our aligned images. I reduced our entire observing run,…

This week I wanted to run our reduction steps on another night of data, to move towards reducing all the data we have, but also to ensure the code and steps will actually work across all the data we’ll be working with. The first thing I did was create a function I called “timesample” which…

This week a python script filled with shiny new functions descended from the heavens into my lap. Like a divine tablet I lugged “shift_methods.py” down from Mt. Moodle and into the desert of my working repository. I started the work of tearing my shoddily built shift functions from my module, sparks and wires flying, until…

This past week it was valentines day, and I wanted to make something pretty, so I made a preliminary three color image of our HL Tau field, which includes L1551 (a really pretty molecular cloud) and a handful of Herbig Haro (HH) objects, which are dramatic outflows, jets, and other signs of star forming activity.…

This week we were tasked with correcting our images for bias. I wrote first about what bias is and why it’s important. Here I’ll discuss my pseudocode and present my bias correction function. Biasing is an electronics term that describes the application of a voltage/current to a circuit or piece of circuit to create more…