Sunday, January 30, 2011

Module 8

Record your results on the blog and send a screen shot to chris martin.

5 comments:

  1. Don't get confused by all the letters and numbers like I did.

    Zoom in to find 5 good (different sized) stars and choose the aperture tool. Then, pick a random size for the inner circle, middle and outer circles. I started with 10, 12 and 14. Then adjust the smalled circle to fit just around the star (use the brush tool to erase your circles, but then make sure to erase your measurements too). Then, when you have it figured out, use the aperture tool on the five stars taking brightness data on each star (take one measure from the blue image, then measure the same star on the visible image). When you have all your data (I just copied and pasted into the worksheet - should have just made my own with Excel) you will need to divide the blue brightness by the visible brightness to get your ratio. Recall that the bluer the star, the hotter it is. Therefore, the star with the higher the B/V ratio will be hottest.

    This is the data that I came up with (Arranged with highest ratio first(hottest))

    Star 1
    Filter B - 1250245.973980
    Filter V - 1821863.836914
    Ratio - 0.6862455

    Star 2
    Filter B - 1611405.915447
    Filter V - 2662623.980389
    Ratio - 0.605194

    Star 3
    Filter B - 27008.926051
    Filter V - 53948.855981
    Ratio - 0.500639

    Star 4
    Filter B - 183870.322194
    Filter V - 384200.558984
    Ratio - 0.478579

    Star 5
    Filter B - 66204.107186
    Filter V - 268040.938744
    Ratio - 0.24699

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  2. Using the B & C I adjusted the images in terms of brightness before I select my 5 stars. My stars are the largest and the brightest.

    The only "hard part" of this module is to adjust the radius so that star will be enclosed by the circle. The main objective of this procedure is to measure the brightness of an object without including possible contributions from contaminating sources such as sky, defects or other stars and galaxies. I used my data to compute for the ratio of B/V using the source sky numbers.

    Using excel, I organized all my data and derive the following results:

    Star 1 - 0.604198722
    Star 2 - 0.684162447
    Star 3 - 0.560058459
    Star 4 - 0.607114933
    Star 5 - 0.585199278

    Since all my stars are among the brightest (according to my eyes)... I got ratios which were closer to each other

    ReplyDelete
  3. I typed my worksheet into Excel to find the following B/V ratios:

    Star 1:0.508677148
    Star 2:0.439987912
    Star 3: 0.372509682
    Star 4:0.553154775
    Star 5:1.907485876

    Hotter stars are more blue, so the higher B/V ratio means you're looking at a hotter star. This means, the stars from hottest to coldest, go in this order: 5,4,1,2,3

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  4. I had some difficulty getting the plugins to work. Five computers later, I found a netbook at school that ImageJ would work on along with the astronomy plugins.

    Once I got it working, I had lots of fun measuring some stars in M5.

    Is there a way to convert the source-sky measurement into a magnitude?


    X Y Filter Brightness B/V Rank
    1221 941 B 46968 0.72 3
    V 64788
    1264 1049 B 10466 0.83 2
    V 12600
    1155 958 B 76912 0.44 5
    V 174956
    1071 1083 B 24807 1.59 1
    V 15594
    1165 1083 B 81695 0.487 4
    V 167700

    ReplyDelete
  5. Okay, I used the X and Y coordinates to make suer that I was clicking on the same star in both images. All stars were within 2 pixels of each other in the X and Y values. My 5 stars and 5 B/V ratios (from hottest to coldest) were

    Star 1 : 1.01
    Star 2 : .810
    Star 3 : .633
    Star 4 : .643
    Star 5 : .560

    I thought for a while before posting these because it seemed squirrley that I had a B/V ratio that is greater than one but, upon thinking about it for a while, it seemed possible. That first star is just very hot, hot enough that the peak of it's emission is a lot closer to blue than any of the other stars so it *is* actually brighter in B.

    Or so I suppose!

    ReplyDelete