My mind is empty I guess
My mind is empty I guess
Here are some papers I think will be important to me
Tidally Delayed Spin-Down of Very Low Mass Stars
Flare from the secondary star of an extreme period binary
Simulations of starspot anomalies within TESS exoplanetary transit light curves
Starspot Inference Using Light Curve Inversion Techniques
An analytic model for rotational modulations in the photometry of spotted stars
You might be wondering, Kaday what did you do this week? I mean other than spend too much time learning how to build this website even though I definitely could've found an easier way to do this then watching many tutorials on how to code in html and css, I did my homework!
What was on the agenda for this week?
Here is my big big question
If you want to know about my project proposal, please feel free to read my scientific justification on the home page. Along with my proposed steps for this academic semester.
For this first week I will be working towards my first big milestone Due March 27: To reduce the raw data we observed in January of this year in Flagstaff Arizona and produce some light curves. The process requires reducing images (bias & flat-field correction), aligning them, selecting the target variable star, and then 2–3 stable, non-variable comparison stars within the same field of view. Then use software (Python's Photutils?) to perform aperture photometry. This calculates the total counts (flux) from the object within a defined aperture, subtracting the surrounding background sky level. Then some differential photometry where I calculate the magnitude difference between target and the comparison stars (target-comp) for each image. This cancels out atmospheric changes (transparency, airmass) that affect all stars equally. And then plot the differential magnitude or normalized flux on the y-axis against the time on the x-axis.
For this week I know it wasn't so important but I spent so many hours getting this site function oh my GOD. Mind you I only just found out a two weeks ago java and javascript are not the same language and I only just used java for the first time last semster. Anyways, I think my reduction pipeline is in pretty good shape. I've removed all instence of removing darks and everything else should work. Regardless will double check, espically for the formula to normalize. I need to go in and look at my code for aligining the images -- I'm not quite sure if this requires the same structure we used for stacking last semester. Coding is a bit daunting to me so I'm giving myself room to breathe this first week. Next Week we'll go hard and heavy (I have so much work to do this week). I think thats as far as I want to get with code like that. We just did a lab using some aperture photomtry and I'll likely be stripping code from that. Overall I'm still heavily in a research phase where I need more papers to determine my own methods and how I will go about analysis.
Here is where I'm suppsed to talk about how I did in working toward your goal from the initial post in particular: How did I start the task? What challenges I you encounter, if any? What is left to do next week?
This being said there is a lot to do for next week. This week I did do a lot of preliminary things to get my organizing set straight. I did much (there still needs to be more) reserch on what exactly I need to do for the semesters and what milestone I need to have done by roughly when. Read More papers but could have had more time to look at my code. I was cut down by the fact that I just did not have time to do it all, which is fine because I do feel better moing forward knowing I have a stronger backbone. I have a greater understanding of the ways in which I would like to move forward but I'm not sure on how to move forward with the finer details like for example, qunatifing the star's activity using sunspots--tricky1 But, by next tuesday I would like to have all my base code up to differential photometry done.