Edward A's Senior Project Blog
Project Title: How is Astronomical Research Conducted from Earth? BASIS Advisor: Sheri Nelson Internship Location: Embry Riddle Aeronautical University Onsite Mentor: Dr. Noel Richardson |
Project Abstract
Space is all around us. We can look up at the night sky and see it all around us. Containing planets, nebulas, and stars, there is so much we do and do not know within our solar system and beyond. As humans, we even dream of venturing into the cosmos and exploring this uncharted realm for ourselves. In our time, however, we’re nowhere near leaving the borders of our solar system and the celestial objects around us are thousands of kilometers if not lightyears away from us. Despite this, we have managed to learn so much about these space and celestial bodies. In this project, I plan to get a first-hand view of how this research occurs. I will be spending my project term at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University working with astronomy professor, Doctor Noel Richardson and some of his students. I will learn how data is collected using instruments on campus, how to analyze the data collected from the instruments and public data from NASA, and how to process the data via Python. I will learn to use these high-tech telescopes and once we learn how to collect data, we will spend most of our time interpreting and processing the data.
Week 10: Let’s End This!
This is it everyone, the final blog post. The time flew by, it feels like I'm barely started this project. But now, I'm happy to report that everything with the main project is now done! I've finished running the rest of the stars through period04, transforming them, and getting the final graph outputs. It... Read More
Week 9: Plotting Problems
Hello everyone, week 9 is now complete! I can't believe there is only one more week left until we're done! This week I began working with period 04 heavily. The way Becca wanted me to do it varied slightly from how Dr. Richardson initially showed us, however, the process is overall similar. Insert the light... Read More
Week 8: Graphs From The Past
Welcome back to my blog everyone! Week 8 is now complete, leaving us with our final 2 weeks on this project. I'm happy with how far we've come; however, this week I did have to backtrack a little. A few weeks ago I talked about how some of the data of the stars we did... Read More
Week 7: Graphing To Come
Week 7 is now done, everyone! I can't believe we're going to be in the final 3 weeks of this project. But this week was a fairly smooth and exciting week! Dr. Richardson introduced us to period 04, the application I talked about last week we'll use to graph the star's data in more... Read More
Week 6: Downloading Dilema
Hey there everyone! We're now more than halfway through this project! I wasn't able to make a blog post last week as I was out sick and was unable to work on my project that whole week. But I was able to return this week, and it had some setbacks. We managed to finish the... Read More
Spring Break
Hi everyone! I am taking spring break off this week and I will resume my project next week. Have a great week! Read More
Week 4: Journeying Through The Stars
And with that week 4 is now completed! This week was simply about continuing what I had started. Now that I understand what I'm doing, I'm able to work a lot faster. I finished coding the data for 3 more stars, bringing Payton and my overall total to 7 stars. There are around 30 stars... Read More
Week 3: Star Struck
Week 3 is completed everyone! And I can now say that I have coded the data for my first star! Becca gave us a code that she has been working on. All I had to do was change things within the code to match the specific star I worked on. Honestly, on its own, it... Read More
Week 2: Python Pain and Star Stirred
Welcome back everyone; week 2 is now complete! As I predicted in my last blog post, this week was primarily focused on learning Python coding and I struggled. When it comes to hardware vs software in the computer world, software isn't always my strongest point. However, this doesn't seem to be just a "me" thing;... Read More
Week 1: Still Down To Earth For Now
Hi everyone! I have just finished my very first week of this project and...there was not much space-related stuff...yet. This was expected though. I knew that before I could get into all the space data, I'd first have to get familiar with the tools I'd be using. I spent this week with one of Dr.... Read More
INTRO: Preparing For Star Gazing
Hi there, and welcome to the first post on my blog! My name is Edward and I'm a big-time space lover! I've loved space since I was 9 years old. I've spent my free time from since then looking up into the night sky, watching YouTube videos on celestial objects in the universe, and keeping... Read More