10:23 pm: Attempt to take a nap. Give up not much later because I only woke up 12 hours ago. Resign myself to being exhausted for the next 24 hours.
11:43 pm: Realize that Dunkin Donuts closes in 17 minutes. Make the sketchy walk from the Quad in the name of caffeine.
11:57 pm: Discover that Dunkin sits on a throne of lies and has closed before midnight. Shake fist and go to Starbucks instead.
12:30 am: Ready to get started! We're taking over the telescope from the group before us, which means that we don't have to worry too much about setup. This would be more handy if the beginning of our transit wasn't still two and a half hours away, but it is nice.
1:57 am: So it took a lot longer than I expected to get things set up, but we just finished up in the dome. Fortunately we're right on schedule--we planned to start taking images right around 2 am so that we'd be prepared when the transit starts around 3. We spent the last hour and a half getting the scope in focus, finding our star, fiddling with the exposure time, and finally setting up the computer to take a bunch of exposures over the next hour or so. Our first few images looked awesome, so I'm optimistic about the rest of the night!
2:45 am: I'm taking advantage of the fact that I haven't collapsed from exhaustion yet to be productive. Maybe this week I'll get all my blog posts done before the hour before they're due! (Sincerest apologies to the lecturers of my bio class, which is right before Astronomy and in which I have finished more than one last-minute blog post...)
2:53 am: *Gets excited all over again about how cool astrochemistry and astrobiology are*
3:13 am: Our first 30 images are done! The transit should have started around 10 minutes ago and it seems like there may have been a decrease in the number of counts on our star, but until we start fooling around with photometry, we won't be able to tell. We were pretty anal following the directions during setup and it's pretty clear out, so I'm really hoping that we can get good data tonight.
3:56 am: It's way past my bedtime.
4:05 am: I just finished the other two blog posts for this week. Now that those are done, I'll be watching some videos to learn how to use some genomic analysis tools for the infectious disease lab I work in. This is peripherally related because the program is called Galaxy, even though all the genomes we have to sequence reside here on Earth. Galaxy is just a cool word I guess.
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| Thanks for always validating me, Google Images <3 |
4:29 am: Our second set of images is done and we're going to start doing some photometry! Fingers crossed that we like what we see...
5:12 am: Our data doesn't make any sense and now clouds are moving in and I want to go to bed and I haven't even made any progress on Galaxy and I think the last time I stayed up this late was to work on the lab report last semester. This is my life now. *Drowns sorrows in brownies*
5:33 am: So the thing is that we have two decent-looking reference stars with which to compare our star's magnitude (as in their magnitudes remain more or less unchanged in all of our images), but all of the other stars that we've chosen as references seem to follow the same changes in magnitude as our object. I'm pretty sure that the shallow dip that we see in our object's magnitude, since it's matched by the plots of most of the other stars, is not actually legit. At the same time, it doesn't make a lot of sense for two of the reference stars to have normal-looking magnitude profiles if there's something atmospheric or something affecting the brightness of all the other stars.
6:04 am: We just shut the telescope and the computer down and will figure this mess out later. Time to head to Kirkland and crash on my friend's couch until my 8 am meeting!
Epilogue (12:40 pm):
We are true scientists.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transiting_exoplanets
Nice work!
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