Protoproject: The First Step in the Formation of My Project
Hey there everyone! For my second blog post, I wanted to give you all a little insight into two of my site placements (By the way, my title for this post comes from the first step in the formation of stars and planets, which are protostars and protoplanets respectively).
Firstly, I’ve been working at the Gilbert Rotary Centennial Observatory, located in the Great Riparian Preserve. Every Friday and Saturday from sunset until 9:30PM, we let in a few people in groups from a line outside to look through the telescope. After they get a chance to look through the telescope, we tell them about whatever they looked at. This information ranges from neat trivia like how Saturn’s rings are only 30 feet thick on average, which makes them practically invisible when we look at the right angle, to scientific information like how samples from OSIRIS-REx had widespread materials for life, to the history of how what they saw was discovered and where it’s name comes from, like how most star names are Arabic because the Arabs were the first to document astronomy. I’ve included a picture that I took at the observatory. To some of you, the red lights might be spooky, but to astronomers they are actually quite comforting! This is because red light is just “dark” to allow us to make unimpaired observations while also still allowing us to see our surroundings. It would be pretty bad if we stumbled into the 40 pound weights on the other side of the telescope. I would really recommend stopping by the observatory this coming Friday or Saturday, as there is currently a planetary parade going on, and it’s really cool to get a chance to look at several of the planets in good detail. The address is 2757 E Guadalupe Rd, Gilbert, AZ 85234, if you’re interested. If you decide to stop by, I’ll see you there!
For the other site placement that I’ll be talking about, it’s my work with the Southwest Student Research Consortium. Currently, we are analyzing some pictures that we “ordered” from the Las Cumbres Observatory in a program called AstroImageJ. AstroImageJ allows us to measure all sorts of things in astronomy, like the separation between two things or their luminosity. This makes it incredibly useful to us, as we can measure anything we need or want to with the program. I’ve attached a photo of one of the binary star pairs (I’ll spare you the mess of numbers that is its name) that we are observing in AstroImageJ. You can see the separation ruler on the top, showing that there is about 20 arcseconds of separation. I’ve also used the sliders on the bottom to adjust the contrast, making it much easier to see the actual stars and not just the light they emit. We can’t conclusively measure anything from just one photo however, as with any discipline of science we need to gather more evidence. Thus, we are taking more observations and doing more research into each binary star pair in the coming weeks.
That’s all from me, and I’ll see you all next time. See ya!
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