The End of Finals!
Finales this year for me have been their longest and most devastating. But now they are over and I am home. Though I start work soon, I believe I will have much more time and energy to give here then when I was in school.
And now the major updates:
I am no longer or will at any point in the future be a resident assistant! I’ve had mixed feelings for this occupation as my staff was amazing and in whole, I found it a very rewarding job. However, Resident Life, the organization that runs on campus housing at the University, was neither amazing or rewarding. I do believe that this will be the topic of many posts to come, and for quite some time as for many of my friends have remained RAs.
Anyways on to the good news. For those of you who don’t know me and somehow managed upon this blog, I am an astronomer, or at least consider myself to be one. About one year ago, while getting a light curve for a previously known extra-solar-planet, we happened upon a feature in the data. This feature had been seen once before and was explained as a starspot. However our feature seemed to be the same length, position and magnitude as the previous one.
To make a long story short we were very intrigued, as where some people higher up, so we were able to get more telescope time, 4 days spread throughout may. The first night was bad; the elevator broke, the motor on the focus broke and and the little things made it so that we went home even before the transit occurred. On the second night it was cloudy. We were able to get some data but the signal to noise was so low were not sure what we could really make of it. The third night was amazing. All thorough the early night clouds were making us pretty nervous, but an hour before the transit began, the sky became crystal clear and were were getting .8 arc second seeing. And the best part is that the feature was back in it’s right place and right size. This is very exciting and I will be anxiously reducing the data and giving you updates for the next several weeks.
