Sines in the Stars

We made it to the conference! Opening reception starts at 7, but I think we'll be attending a few meetings to prepare our poster presentation before then.

The research will continue! Each team will be given ten more stars to phasebin and analyze for more believable patterns. Then we have to each assemble education and science posters to present at the AAS (American Astronomical Society) meeting in the Spring. I'm glad we haven't quite given up on our stars yet.

We're plotting the data in as many different combinations as possible to see if we can find something groundbreaking. Two notable plots (period vs. amplitude and period vs. radius I think) with the three different types (clump, RGB, and secondary clump) in different colors and shapes showed that the clump stars were consistently higher energy than the RGB and secondary clump stars. On one of the graphs, a line of best fit could passably be made out of the rising trend of clump stars. We also found some slanted gaps in the graphs. Now we're discussing the future. Will we continue our research or will we latch onto the non correlations we found? I, for one, want to continue researching. We have so much data, so I think it would be sad to give up after just analyzing some aesthetically appealing phasebins. What about the wavy light curves or the scattered forests or the double bumps?

I have used higher level math all day today. David taught us how to calculate the mass of a star.

The time board in our meeting room tracks an ongoing mission and the 10 year anniversary is in late August.

This is the building we do all our work in. The police moped never moves.

Last night at dinner, Steve inducted us into the highly esteemed club of Astrophysicists. I’ve never even taken physics (but at least now I know about HR diagrams, Kepler’s Laws, Solar units, CGS units, gravitational constants, and how to calculate the mass of stars). It’s been a pretty successful two days.

The Caltech observatory is open and observing something. (Why didn't we visit there?)

Fancy fountain and fancy walkway featuring my favorite windy tree and the lovely campus entrance.

Tomorrow is our last day so I went on a picture-taking spree of Caltech.

This is the full scale model of the Mars Curiosity. It had JPL in morse code on its tires, a negatively charged color palette, and a quarter on its back. Our guide explained to us how the Curiosity had to land via crane rocket due to Mars' thin atmosphere and the Curiosity's large scale.

JPL deer love people and purple flowers.

This is the second possible greatest room on the planet. I like the practice field, so it may just be first.

Possibly one of the greatest rooms on the planet.

Inside the JPL press conference room! We met Veeger.

Galileo has a cute little pocket with a folded American flag tucked inside. c: