Astro 293 Project:

Guidelines:

Preliminary Plan

Final Plan

• confirm that you are still doing an observational or archival project.
• identify the topic and specific questions or investigation you will be pursuing.
• give an outline of your planned research. For an observational project this would consist of expected observations, data reduction and analysis path. For an archival project, you must identify your data sources, means of garthering the data, and plan of analysis.
• in all cases, clearly state your goals and what you expect to accomplish in the course of your project.

Some project ideas:

1) If you want to take the data yourself, you can do photometry with the 24" telescope on the roof by yourself.

2) For photometry, you can, e.g., measure light curves, look for variabiltiy, study extinction, count stars or galaxies, etc.

3) For spectroscopy, you can do spectroscopic typing, measure radial velocities, measurement, equivalent widths, etc. Currently this will have to be done with data archives.

4) If you want to get data from someone or somewhere and don't want to rely on the weather, you can get it from published papers, catalogs, and electronic archives. I'll show you how to get data through computer network.

5) For this project, you can even repeat other people's work and see if your results agree with others. However, you need to demonstrate that you have redone the measurements. Or, you can use more recent data (maybe the data you obtained yourself) and see if there are any changes.

6) Examples:

A way of starting a project is to see what others have done and see if you can do their experiemtn differently. For example, perhaps you don't agree with their methods or strategy. Or perhaps more recent data have been obtained. You can look in your astronomy text book and get some ideas. Below are just a few examples that I come up with in a few minutes. You are encourge to come up other idea. I will also add more on the Astro 293 web page as well.

a) repeat the HR diagram lab but on more clusters and more recent data and compare their ages and their distribution in space etc.

b) spectroscopically classify some stars that you see in a paper using a different method or more recent observations and see does it make any difference to the conclusions obtained.

c) look up some binary data and see if you can put them on the HR diagram and compare with theoretical predications on masses, ages etc.

d) compare cluster of stars at different wavelengths (say X-ray and optical) and see if you can find anything interesting, any correlation or anything that you didn't expect.

e) look up the redshifts of galaxies/quasars etc and see if you can get what Hubble saw and estimate your Hubble constant.

f) come up with a new method for finding high redshift galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field.

Titles of Spring 1997 Projects: