On the night of Sep 06/07, 2020, I welcomed Physics majors Evan Muskopf and Vince Iglesias-Cardinale to the RIT Observatory. They are doing senior capstone projects involving the analysis of astronomical data, and will be acquiring images to support their projects over the next two semesters.
Vince is going to measure the motion of the nearby stars GX And and/or Ross 248. His job will be to disentangle their proper motion from their parallactic ellipses, and determine the distance to each star. We will supplement measurements from RIT with those taken from archival data from PTF/ZTF.
Evan will measure the light curve of the eclipsing binary system RT And through several filters. His goal is to make a physical model of the system; in addition, he may check the long-term behavior of the period.
The weather turned out to be cloudy this evening, against expectations, so we did not do very much beyond setting up and taking calibration frames. In the future, each student individually will join me for observing sessions.
Last modified 9/8/2020 by MWR.