CN's+Week+of+November+26

Monday, November 26, 2007
I received an email from Joe and I'M GOING OBSERVING TONIGHT! Well... Hopefully! I'm still not exactly certain but I'm pretty sure I am! Yay! :) Also, all the other times for this week for observing are set, too.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Didn't get to go observing yesterday... :( I'm sad. Dr. L sent a link about spectroscopy. But I don't know if it's the proper link or not, because it showed up in code...

I brought observing variable stars to class! So I can read up some information! It's been easier going through this book then looking up stuff online.

Dr. L showed us how to sign up for remote observing with New Mexico Skies Observatory. We then set up a time to observe at 9 tomorrow. I'll need to remember our user name and password for later observing. **Remember** to talk to Dr. L whenever you are planning to observe, because it costs money to do remote observing!

I've been taking some notes from Observing Variable Stars. Here is a link to the document that I have started. It isn't much, because we spent some time on finding out how to schedule observing times. I'll continue to update this document later! [|Observing Variable Stars Outline.doc]

Wednesday, November 28, 2007
So I started to take some more notes from the book Observing Variable Stars. I'll probably just add this document to my logbook entries page so I don't have to keep putting it up!

I had a discussion with Dr. L about our observing tonight. We talked about the information that we would want to send to the people down at Kitt Peak about our star V Cet. We are planning to set up another time for tomorrow. There are suppose to be some clouds tonight that might disrupt our observing... Also, he told me that I should take two pictures. One at the start and one at the end that will compare v cet with another star (our comparison star).

Thursday, November 29, 2007
Yesterday, I went observing at Jordan Hall. We couldn't find the star V Cet. The program wouldn't take any coordinates or other forms of V Cet and find the star for us. We tried to get to it manually but the telescope had limitations and wouldn't reach that far it seemed. We were going to try and observe tonight but I'm not sure if we still are because the weather in New Mexico is suppose to be rainy. I did learn how to use the program though. It seems easy enough. The program works in that you search for what it is you want to look for. You can type in the name or another identifier and you "slew" to it. From there, you need to set up your camera. We used a bias, dark, flat reduction with a 60 second exposure. We also learned how to make colored images. First, you slew to what it is you want to take a picture of. Then, you change it to Take Color. After that, you have to set up the filters and change the minutes/seconds with a certain ratio. Then you let the telescope take the pictures! And then we'll give the images over to the AstroImaging group to develop a color picture!

We signed up for observing tonight again. I'll be looking for some possible targets to look at in case we can't find V Cet in the sky again. This will help in just learning how to use the material and get a handle on things.

Hello again! Once again the night of observing was a bust! They didn't have the telescopes up and running because I believe it was raining down in lovely New Mexico! But I was able to talk to Joe about some things dealing with Variable Stars. I was having some trouble with finding some star charts for the stars I was planning on looking at tonight, so he helped me with how to do that on the AAVSO website. I just didn't know what to put into certain categories/lines of the submission form for the star so I was all confused. He also taught me how to read a star chart, because I realized I actually didn't know how to do that. There are numbers on the chart that represent the magnitude of the star that it's by. That I did not know. Also, the stars with numbers are the stars that you would likely compare your variable star to, to determine magnitudes. We then got into a discussion about using comparison stars when observing a variable star. You need to pick two comparison stars for your one variable star. One that is relatively brighter and one that's relatively fainter. He showed me the project that he did over the summer with some other students that I've mentioned before. He showed me the three different light curves they created: visual, CCD, and photometric. He also told me how you can find out the magnitude of the variable star when you are using the CCD. That you have to analyze the pictures you take and determine how many photons you get for each your variable star and your comparison star. You would then plug it in an equation and from there you should arrive at the magnitude for the variable star.

Equation: Mvariable = Mcomparison 2.5 log10 (Fcomparison / Fvariable)

We also talked about what kind of project I might do for the science fair/competition (I don't really know what it is..). So we've decided to start looking for some possible candidates. We'll basically be looking for a short-period variable star that needs more observations that we might be able to post to the AAVSO website. After we've decided what star I might start looking at, we would decide what kind of project that star might allow us to do. Because if it was an eclipsing star, we could determine stuff like the distance between the two stars and other information about them.

So.. there might be more that I learned or did tonight.. but I really can not remember anymore at this time! If i do remember something else, I'll let you know! :)

Friday, November 30, 2007
Well, I decided to change my Variable Stars page around a little bit. I wanted it to look a little better and I thought I'd add a bit more information to the page. Yup.. That's about all I did!