If You Can't Find Me, I'm on the Yerkes South Lawn

Sorry for the lack of blogs as of late. With the loom of the final project, most of everything else had moved out of my mind.

Wednesday, or the day before the presentation consisted of almost too many twist and curves to keep track of. My and Jahnvi's project was about binary stars, which seems simple, but we ran into a host of problems. Our first error was in googling a number that was far too small and receiving an incorrect solution. Once we had finally figured out that issue, our worries once again grew.

We had different sources of information in order to get a pixel versus millimeter count. The image, video, and printout were all returning different results for the separation between the stars. We never really did figure out how and why the result was different on screen versus other orbits, but we were basically able to use the most consistent measurement.

Jahnvi and I worked on this aspect of our project up until dinner, and after dinner we had the class wide bonfire. Apparently, the tradition started a few years ago and the classes have a fire with s'mores near the end of the week as a sort of bonding and celebration experience. We ended up a playing long game of blob tag before Jahnvi and I took advantage of the better WIFI at Yerkes and went back up to work.

After we got kicked out up at the observatory, we joined many of our fellow classmates who were taking advantage of the marginally better WIFI provided by the second floor and continued working on our project.

Today provided more of the same. Our project still needed more information to make it complete as we had calculated our separation of stars and nothing else, so we spent the morning trying to add as much as we could to our calculations.

In order to have a presentation that could fit all of the information from yesterday and the information from what we added today, we had to work through lunch. Thankfully just as Jahnvi asked, Nikita brought up nearly a full loaf of bread to each to keep us full until dinner. It amused our classmates, but it got the job done.

Carly and Jahnvi

We were the last to present. Considering that we had added significantly to our analysis in the morning and around half of our slides depicted our dead ends, I think we did well. Our topic relied heavily on data being available in the past, but data like that requires a shorter period which we did not look for. If I were to do the whole project again I would find a binary star system with a short orbital period and many plates of recorded data.

After the afternoon session of class and dinner, Carly, Jahnvi, and I decided to finally go swimming. At one point both Jahnvi and I had jumped in and were trying to convince Carly to join us as it had been her idea to begin with. That went on for another 10 minutes or so before Carly finally came into the water. At that point, we were told that the lifeguard had already left, so we got out of the water and laid out in the Sun until a big group consisting of MA, Jared, Nick, Mac, Lister, and Will also wandered down to the dock and we talked with them until nearly 8.

Lister on the dock

Just as I thought, being at Yerkes created a great space to get to know all my classmates a lot better, which has been wonderful.

When I returned to the observatory at 9 for the last session, I waited to use the 24” the only telescope I had yet to use. Though it takes great images, I wasn’t really missing much, it’s considerably less fun to get images from the 24” than it is to get information from the 40”, as the 24” is far less hands on. Today we could use the computer ourselves, but the real fun was lost. The 40” is definitely my favorite telescope.

The sky was all around beautiful tonight, so much that Ms. Ramseyer turned off the lights in the library so they wouldn’t interfere with the view on the south lawn. The sky was beautifully clear and you could see more stars than I could see on Monday. The Milky Way was very clearly visible and there were more stars visible than are typically visible.

At the 40” we looked at M17 which looked like a cloud patch, and a few binary star systems. Before I knew it, class was over. We took photos with our instructors and Jahnvi and I waited so we could individually and in person say goodbye to each instructor before heading back down the hill to our dorms.

It feels like I’ve been in this class so much longer than 3 weeks, and it feels so strange to no longer be seeing the people in my class five days a week.