Variability of the Mid-IR Sky Current Research Activities

Variability of the Mid-IR Sky Proposal

Here is the link to our Spring 2010 proposal http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/teacher_research/r4-variab/variabProposal.pdf

Variability of the Mid-IR Sky Summer visit

We will be arriving on Thursday Aug 5, departing Aug 9 in hopes of working the three full days of Aug 6, 7 and 8. CLICK HERE for details

Caltech Summer Visit Discussion

Rebecca

Wow, so the last couple of days has been very very very eventful!!! Meeting everyone was tons of fun and I think this was a great experience for me to learn and meet new people outside of Lincoln-Way North and Frankfort, Illinois. Hahaha. The flight went very well, no problems whatsoever. Joey made a new girrllfrienddd on the plane. She was Oriental and kept falling and nodding asleep on his shoulder. Joey was sooo embarrassed. Good times. The hotel looked nice on this inside, but it wasnt very clean. Me and Olivia found about 100 ants and a HUGEEEE cockroach/beetle!!!! It was disgusting. She was sooo determined to kill it!!!! Beforehand, we went to Santa Monica Beach and had a great time running in and out of the ocean.

Generating Light Curves - APT and Excel

You can find info to help you practice using APT to generate light curves on this page.

Standard Deviation for Dummies

Our Astronomers said it would be important for us to understand standard deviation. We found the button on Excel that calculates it for us, but doesn't really explain what it is. Here's an explanation and example.

Standard deviation is a statistical measure of spread or variability. The standard deviation is tells you how closely the data are clustered around the average. We want to use the aperture and background subtraction settings that give us the smallest standard deviation for a star that is not varying. Our varying stars will of course have large standard deviations because they ARE varying.

Formula:

Standard Deviation standard deviation formula

where Σ = Sum of X = Individual score M = Mean (average) of all scores N = Sample size (Number of scores)

Example: Find the Standard deviation of 3,2,1,1,and 3

Step 1: Calculate the mean (average) and deviation.

X	M	(X-M)	(X-M)2
3	2	1	1
2	2	0	0
1	2	(-1)	1
1	2	(-1)	1
3	2	1	1

Step 2:Find the sum of (X-M)2 1+0+1+1+1 = 4

Step 3:N = 5, the total number of values.Find N-1. 5-1 = 4

Step 4:Now find Standard Deviation using the formula. √4/√4 = 1

Individual School Pages

Communicating on Wiki!!!

Wiki will tell you when anyone makes an edit or comment to any page if you

-log in, click on my preferences, put your whole name in for your signature if you want, check off all of the boxes at the bottom to turn on the email function
-go to the pages you want to "watch" and click on on the Watch tab, you'll get an email if there is a change to these pages
-watch your practice page and everyone elses practice pages for now so you know any of us make a comment or put up something new
-Please make comments using the discussion tab on anything and everything right now!
-if you feel the urge to make the comment on the actual page, that's ok for any pages under Variability of the Mid IR Sky seeing that these are our pages, but if you comment on the main coolwiki, use the discussion page.

Lincoln-Way North High School in Frankfort, Illinois

Teacher - Peggy Piper - Students - Joey R. - Rebecca R. - Justin C.

Here are our light curves with standard deviations for the three test stars using Source Model B.
From top to bottom in each graph, they are stars #1, #2, and #3.

Mrs. P Question to you - which aperture background should we choose? Why?

Joey's Data for Aperture 3, Background 10 20

Joey aperture 3 background 10-20

Rebecca's Data for Aperture 5, Background 5 10

Rebecca aperture 5 background 5-10

Joey's Data for Aperture 10, Background 12 20

Joey aperture 10 background 12-20

Mars pics for Mr. DeCoster

I moved these to their own page to take up less space --Peggy Piper 10:10, 29 July 2010 (PDT)

Niles West High School in Skokie, Illinois

Teacher - Rich DeCoster
Student - Alex
Student - Aneesh

Determining Fields - Rich images and links

Here's Rich's work from when we first were determining which fields to use. I think it probably ties in well with Alex's very nice tutorial:)--Peggy Piper 10:06, 29 July 2010 (PDT)

Identifying Objects in ds9: a Pictorial Tutorial by Alex Antonow

Here are two light curves by Alex

Media:APT_star_1_and_2.xls

North Middle School, Great Falls, Montana

click on title above to get page to edit

Teacher - Beth Thomas Student - Drew B. Student - Olivia R.

Summer Discussion Topics

How Does Spitzer Work

So let's start looking into the details of how Spitzer works! I put a few subheadings below, we can add more as we go. Lets start with the mission. How 'bouts each of you come up with some facts about the history, the purpose, the reason Spizter was launched. There's plenty of info and links on this coolwiki.

Rules:

1. come up with and list 5 facts (not here, on History/Mission page!)
2. you can't repeat someone else's fact (if you do this soon, its easier - poor Joey's out of town til Sat!)
3. once facts are up, come up with several questions about someone else's facts and post them below the fact (make sure you hit the signature button so we know who's talking)

This time we'll talk right on the topic page instead of the discussion page.Click on History/Mission to see how I started. Ha - I took the easy ones!

Variable Stars

http://aavso.org/vstar/

Studying Variable Stars

Here's the link to some variable star lessons Beth put together - very nice!

Acronyms and Vocab and Our Proposal, Oh my!!

ya know...Lion's and Tiger's and Bear's, Oh my!!

Our Glorious Leaders

Most Definitely a couple of Cool Dudes

Here is link to ‘‘DARK MATTER’’ IN ACCRETION DISKS by Steve Howell and Don Hoard that is of interest

Other items

This is Rich. I hope I am not causing confusion. It is 11:15 am CST on Friday Jan. 22, 2010. I am trying to see what this does, since I have "editing" status here. Is this something we use instead of email, or is it a place to create documents that we edit together? Rich ps-Should something like this be in the "discussion" tab rather than the "article" tab?

Hi Rich - no, you're not causing confusion, you're doing it exactly right! These pages under "current research activities" are really sort of "shared white boards". The other half of the wiki (under "research tools") are more articles, and in those cases, yes, questions should go into the discussion pages. I copied some headers in here, but please see some of the "current research activity" pages for the other current teams to see how they are using their pages. (e.g., cg4's page) Oh, and you can use this for whatever you want -- proposal preparation, conversation, sharing plots, brainstorming, etc. --Rebull 13:12, 22 January 2010 (PST)