Week of April 21st

This week, we just finished our poster for the Research Symposium. It took awhile and many drafts, though. No new information was found, it was just the process of scaling and copying everything we had learned onto a poster. We decided our future discussions would consist of fixing the magnification effect in our photos. There should be a way to do that somewhere, it will just take some finding. The poster includes our abstract, introduction, procedure, discussion and future works, along with our literature cited. It is pretty much a condensed version of the paper. That being said, I am glad to say it is finally all set and behind us.

Week of April 14th

This week we were able to do all the finishing Mars measurements. We calculated the difference between the size of Mars before and after. Unfortunately, we found that Mars before was larger. This is clearly impossible, Mars cannot be bigger a month before opposition, than on opposition. We believe that this was due to the magnification effect on the horizon. So, we needed to change the theory of our project, essentially. Instead, we just took the pictures of Mars from opposition in order to compare the size and distance from Earth. In our project, we decided to talk about the magnification effect and what our original project would have been. So, although it did not turn out the way we thought, it still worked out. The pictures from opposition still worked as an accurate size and distance measurement. We just could not do the comparison that we wished to do.

Week of April 7th

This week, on the 8th, we were able to get our pictures of Mars at Opposition. Along with Mars, we also took pictures of Mizar A and B. The on issues we originally had was that one of the camera adapter rings was screwed off. there are two different rings of different lengths. So, we had to take new pictures of a star set just to make sure we were comparing correct lengths, in case the previous star set pictures were different. After we got the pictures, we were able to start calculations. This week we only got up to averaging the opposition pictures together and finding the pixel measurements. This was along with the star set.

Week of March 31st

There was not much we could do this week. We finished pretty much anything we could do with our last Mars pictures. The opposition is not until next week. Then we will have more material to actually work with.