A Night at the Observatory

We are bounded in a nutshell of Infinite Space: Week 11: Free Form #15: A Night at the Observatory

Oh to be doing the Exoplanet Challenge. Here I am, awake during the daytime after being conscious throughout the night, and the weight on my eyelids is as strong as its ever going to be, and the fact I tried reading Plato this morning for my Ancient Greek class didn’t help at all. These are the thoughts that echo after spending last night (this morning) looking at HAT P 37b, a transiting exoplanet crossing in front of a star found in the Draco Constellation. As part of the Astronomy 16 course, we have the option of taking on the Exoplanet Challenge, a chance to use some of the more advanced tools available to undergraduates to try and find evidence of a planet crossing in front of a star we are observing. The challenge gives the unique opportunity of having to go up to the 8th floor of the Harvard Science Center, open the Astronomy Lab, and start prepping for the use of the Clay Telescope, all on our own (in groups of 2 or 3). As such, my partner and I went up to the telescope at midnight, set up all the systems, and waited until we had the data to be analyzed to find evidence of the transit and understand what it means. However, around 4:30 am, as we made the second batch of warm water for tea and coffee, we started comparing the photometry (brightness signatures) from the stars, waning to be sure we had indeed looked at the right object. As we plotted the graph, we could hardly make sense of the data, it shifting several times and having strange reference stars of which the main object’s signature was calculated by the software. We were lost for a bit. Soon after, around 5:30 am, the Sun started coming up on the horizon, and as such we started closing up shop and preparing to leave to a proximate future of a couch somewhere near. Leaving, we weren’t sure we had done it correctly, even though there was no step we could have missed, and we worried over having to go through this ordeal again.  

All this being said, we definitely lucked out with weather. And as we spoke coming out of the building, we knew there were slight places to grow and be more precise. We also understood that there was a definite value to being in the observatory all night, seeing how the sky moved throughout the night, and having the lab became not only be workspace, but starting to see it and the telescope as an extension of our senses. We grew to appreciate the instrument, and be fond of it the way one is of ones hands and eyes, but now having a dear appreciation of how they allow us to peer into the unknown. Ultimately, we were able to fix the data analysis, seeing as how we were using bad stars as references, and with the correction we could now clearly make out the light curve of the planet transit, the white whale we had been hunting throughout the night, with a better understanding of how difficult the job of the hunting sea captain, the searching astronomer, is, and what he can become.