The COSMOS eclipsing binary project homepage
one of the astronomy projects was to observe an eclipsing binary star. Meghan Fuson, Lucy Romero, and Maricela Ramos worked on this together with Patrik. Here's some stuff from the project.
Project description
(its a big file) [.ps.gz] [PDF]
Pictures
This is a color image that we made by combining images taken through the red, green, and blue filters at the telescope. The bright star in the center is OO Aql.
This is the light curve of OO Aql that we obtained. Included here are observations from May 30, June 23, July 4 and 5 and July 11. The red line is the model that we adjusted to agree with our observations.
This is an image of what the binary stars look like, from the computer program Nightfall that we used to compute the light curve. As you can see, the stars are actually so close together that they touch.
PowerPoint presentations
Meghan's
Lucy's
Mari's
Reporting our observations
We reported our observations to the AAVSO.
When they are published, I'll add a link here.
Project data
here is our collected light curve, from all the observations. It's been folded by the period of the star, so the independent variable is orbital phase from 0 to 1, and the dependent variable is the magnitude of the star. The actual magnitude is arbitrary, only the differences between different points in the orbit matter.
in case you don't want to deal with magnitudes, here is the light curve, but with the relative light intensity instead of magnitude, from 0 to 1.
The full photometry data set can be found here. There's one file for each night, the columns are:
- image name
- time, in hours after the time zero point which is mentioned at the beginning of the file
- zero point shift, in magnitudes. This is how much the magnitudes of the reference stars shifted since the first image.
- magnitude of OO Aql.
- a weight, indicating how uncertain the magnitude is. Low weight means uncertain magnitude.
- then follows the magnitudes and weights of all the reference stars.
Also at the beginning of the file is the epoch, the number of periods completed since the epoch zero point, which is Julian date 2438239.720, and the magnitude of the brightest reference star which is needed to compute zero point differences between different nights.
patrik@ucolick.org
Last modified: Mon May 13 15:15:01 2002
