Hello everyone!
So as it turns out, we have not been very good about these ‘weekly’ updates. Here is a bit of an update from week 2 – week 6!
First of all, below are some pictures from a late night telescope visit earlier this term:
During this particular session, we took spectral readings of the Orion nebula and Sirius, which were used for calibration. This was done using the DADOS spectroscope.
The poor quality of the spectrum is due to the fact that this is a picture of the screen in the observatory (don’t worry, our actual data is better than this!)
Of course this was all after we focused the telescope by spying on some office workers. When you are located somewhere like London (i.e. an area of extreme light pollution and perpetually dismal weather), sometimes the best targets for observation are offices and bars (whoops?). Before going home, we looked at the moon briefly – here is a picture taken through the telescope (with an iPhone camera):
We took this picture of the moon by pressing a phone camera up against the eyepiece of the telescope
After this, the next couple of weeks primarily focused on analyzing the data we obtained and writing a code to give us pretty graphs like the one that Conor is pointing at below from our original spectral data (shout-out to AJ and Ethasham for doing the heavy lifting on this part of the project!)
Conor points at a screen (!)
Keep an eye out for our next post (coming soon!) where we’ll talk about what we’ve done since then!
– Despina, Conor, Isaac, Ethasham, and AJ
Dark London Skies 