Light curves, good news and bad news

Hello, I'm just going to pick up from where we left off in our last blog, and talk about the light curves. But first, some good news!

The LCOGT (Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network) have been in contact with us. They are the group which provide our Microlensing Targets, and collect all the data from the observations, then put them into Light Curve Graphs. They have offered to help us with our project, and we can help them with theirs. They seem very happy that a school group is involved in the search for new planets, and would like to improve their system as much as possible.

This is great news for us, as even being in contact with astronomers from such a group is an honor. We will be replying to their e-mails tomorrow, and we hope that we can learn a lot from them.

Now onto the Light Curves.
A light curve graph maps out the brightness of the star during the microlensing event. The light gets brighter, then dims in a steady curve. However, if there is a sudden change to that light, a blip occurs on the graph, and it means you have just found a planet. The change in brightness due to a planet, can last anything from half an hour to a day, depending on how fast it orbits the star. Here is a great example of what this blip looks like.

And, to show our work on this project, we hope to be able to upload examples of Light Curves before and after we submit our data.


Now, on to the bad news.
We were supposed to observe for an hour today, but we were unable to do so as an "unusual error" was occurring. We could move the telescope to point at the right place, but couldn't do anything after that.

We thought it might have been the weather (as the telescope is designed to automatically close if it rains) so we checked the weather status. However the humidity, temperature and wind were all reasonable, and we could see no reason for the error to be caused by weather.

We stayed there for almost all of the hour, in case it worked again. We tried looking at various different things, and we couldn't use it at all. We are all fairly disappointed about this, as it cuts into our observing time greatly.

Also, the telescope is completely booked out for the weekend, so we have to wait until next Monday to observe! But we will just have to work on another aspect of the project until then.