I Touched Books That Are Way Older Than Me

Today was mostly about working about our projects in class, so I'll go over the few things that weren't actually project focused to begin with. 

Galileo on Jupiter's moons

We had another guest lecturer in class today, a grad student named Gourav Khullar who studies Extragalactic Astrophysics. He spoke to us for over an hour about galaxy formation before and after lunch, and told up how color seems to have some correlation with star formation. It was a an interesting presentation, and he left it very open to questions.

We also spent time at the Regenstein Library looking at some of their rare books and manuscripts. Some of these rarities included a book that Galileo had written corrections in directly, a catalog of locations of planets and constellations from 1676, and one of Chandrasekhar's notebooks. I was beyond surprised when we were told that we could actually touch these books. I walked around for the full hour we were there reading and looking at the books as much as I could. A few of the books were in Latin and Italian, and there was one in Greek, so little reading was actually done.

Interesting news about my project. For most the day it seemed nearly certain that I wouldn't actually be able to find the luminosity of the pulsar, and possibly not even the magnitude. The problem was that for some reason on all of the websites that we commonly use in class there was no information on the magnitudes of stars near to the pulsar. Which is a large problem, as I'm using the Crab Nebula, a very well known nebula, so it was a bit confusing to not have information on any stars just outside the field of the nebula. 

I spent the morning and most of the afternoon trying to relate the same stars in two different images to each other in the hopes that the count on both would be similar enough to say the ratio was 1:1. This was a reach to begin with, but without any other options I went for it. I related a total of 4 images with hope of finding a star with similar numbers. When that didn't happen The attempt shifted to trying (again) to find the magnitude of a nearby star. Mr. DeCoster mentioned a site that Ms. Ramseyer(who was helping me) and I hadn't used yet. Of course this was where a catalog of information about the stars nearby were including the magnitudes of each in different colors of the visible spectrum. 

Once I had that information it was significantly less work to find out the magnitude of the pulsar, but the results weren't exactly what I expected showing that the pulsar had more light in the red part of the spectrum than the green which means the pulsar would supposedly be only 5000 K, a ridiculously small number for a pulsar, and probably due to the fact there was something blocking a clear enough view to have a reliable temperature.

Jahnvi and I ended up leaving the classroom around 5:30 PM overall thankful that our instructors were willing to stay so much longer to help us.