Variable Star Observations at Kitt Peak National Observatory

As part of my undergraduate Capstone research, I was given the opportunity to travel to Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona to use the WIYN .9m telescope.

In January 2019 I, along with a few fellow students and our academic advisers, spent a week atop Kitt Peak. At night, we would be out in the control room in the dome, handing off control of the telescope to divide the time between our various projects. During the day (when we weren’t sleeping), we were able to join visitors to Kitt Peak on their tours of some of the other telescopes on the mountain. As observers, the tour guides allowed us to talk to the visitors about our research, as well as answer some of the visitors’ questions about what it was like to observe on the mountain.

The research I conducted (and am currently still working on) involves classifying variable stars –specifically, RR Lyraes– which may not have been previously classified or whose classifications are uncertain. One can categorize a particular star by its light curve, which shows how the star changes in brightness over time. By looking at the shape of an RR Lyrae’s light curve, one can determine which type of RR Lyrae the star is (RRab, RRc, RRd, RRe).

In order to measure how bright a star is at a particular time, I use a CCD, which is a special, scientific camera that produces high-quality images when pointed through a telescope. By taking many pictures of the same star over time, I am able to produce a light curve of a particular star– each image I take would be one data point on that light curve.

The images I took at Kitt Peak contain my star, obviously, but they also contain many other stars, as well as some galaxies. Upon returning from Kitt Peak, I found that my original target was not the only variable star in my images! As a result, I am now attempting to categorize these “extra” variable stars, as well. The serendipity of this discovery, and why I think curiosity and exploration are extremely important in astronomy (and science in general), became the subject of a short talk I gave to the Astronomy Section of the Rochester Academy of Science; I have written more about this specific talk here.

Over the course of my capstone project, I ended up writing some useful Python code to manage, organize and view my data and light curves– I’ve made a version of that code available on GitHub here.