Tag Archives: telescope

We now have enough data to make a plot showing how the period of KIC 9832227 has (or has not) been changing since we started observing at the end of November. And that plot looks like this: In this graph, the horizontal x-axis is time (the date), and the vertical axis is the orbital periodContinue reading “Speedup, Slowdown, or Steady As She Goes?”

Waiting for some more bad weather to clear, so let’s talk about time … There are a handful of different time zones that are relevant to this project: Local Time: Right now, local time for me is Eastern Standard Time. This is the time zone that I use for planning telescope observations. I can easilyContinue reading “Clocks and Time Zones”

Yuk. We’re getting into our full-blown winter weather pattern, which makes observing more difficult. Nonetheless, sessions 6 (December 24) and 7 (January 1) are noteworthy because they contain the first “dual” session observing KIC 9832227. On both days, I had the telescope observe KIC 9832227 from sunset (about 5pm) until “star-set” (about 9pm) and thenContinue reading “Sessions 6 & 7: Break of Dawn”

My original reason to study KIC 9832227 wasn’t to create a lightcurve, but to measure the timing of this star to see if I could detect changes in the period over time: are the stars spiraling toward each other? Observing session 5 was a good session, although I started well after sunset because of anotherContinue reading “Session 5: First Timing Measurement”

Sunday December 15: Observing Session 4 Once again, weather interfered. Had to throw away at least an hour’s worth of images due to clouds. Nevertheless, we’ve now accumulated a grand total of 1,040 usable images, each of which provides one brightness measurement. Let’s see what we can do with that. This (unimpressive) graph shows theContinue reading “Session 4: First Lightcurve”

5pm Thursday, December 12 I’m ready to test things. I’ve made a series of software changes: When the software is unable to measure the blurriness of an image (because it’s too blurry), the rest of the software will correctly ignore the focus of that image. All blurriness measurements are adjusted based on the image’s heightContinue reading “Observing Session #3”

5pm on Wednesday, December 11 By the way, I’ve added a spot on the blog’s cover page where I’ve listed all the blog entries in order, since it can be hard to figure out how to read these entries from beginning to end and they probably don’t make a lot of sense out of order.Continue reading “Planning Observing Run #2”

Curious minds are looking for answers: What was the airmass problem? And just what is airmass, anyway? Why did the quality of the images get worse and worse as the night went on? Is there anything different we can (or should) do next time? Airmass: What is it? When you look at a star thatContinue reading “What Happened During that First Observing Run?”

Ignoring, for the moment, all the problems and questions about the observing run on the night of November 26, did we actually get enough information to do some real science? Summarizing what we have: A total of 511 images, each exposed for 30 seconds The final 148 images of those 511 are generally totally unusableContinue reading “Finding the Science”

5:30am Wednesday Nov 27 It’s 5:30am. The alarm has just gone off, and I’m getting out of bed to go turn things off. First thing I notice: the weather has gone way downhill. It’s foggy. There are no stars, but worse than that, the telescope, camera, and mount are soaking wet from dew. Sigh. SecondContinue reading “The Morning After”