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Hello.
This may seem like a somewhat trivial question and may be placed in the wrong subforum (sorry if it is), but please consider my question seriously as it is important to me.
Background:
The university I attend owns a 0.6m Ritchey-Chretien telescope and an http://www.ccd.com/alta_u9000.html" camera which I have been using for the past year. My work so far has been doing some all sky photometry of some distant star cluster using the Johnson-Cousins standard filters. The work has been primarily based in the V and B filters for Color Index determination. The work has mainly contributed to calculating distances to these star clusters via spectroscopic parallax accounting for atmospheric extinction (interstellar extinction has not been accounted for, but we are still looking into it). I have also done work in astrometry/photometry of minor planets and photometry of variable stars.
Question:
I have been asked to come up with a research outline for my senior thesis based off some of the work I have done so far. My professor's have given me the flexibility, however, to choose the direction I take in deciding the actual research topic.
My question to anyone who is interested in astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology is which avenue's of research are open to me with equipment at hand? In other words, can any of you suggest research topics which (seeing permitted :-S ) I could tackle and would be interesting and useful.
At this point the work I have done has been incredibly interesting and satisfying but I haven't found any real use for my data.. Calculating distances isn't incredibly useful at this point (at least that is how I am starting to feel). I would really like to do work that would be worthy of submission/publication to a physics/astronomy journal. Even if that is thinking with my head in the clouds I would simply love to be able to do some more interesting research on some new topics, so if any of you can point me in a direction or give me some advice I would be very grateful. Thank you!
This may seem like a somewhat trivial question and may be placed in the wrong subforum (sorry if it is), but please consider my question seriously as it is important to me.
Background:
The university I attend owns a 0.6m Ritchey-Chretien telescope and an http://www.ccd.com/alta_u9000.html" camera which I have been using for the past year. My work so far has been doing some all sky photometry of some distant star cluster using the Johnson-Cousins standard filters. The work has been primarily based in the V and B filters for Color Index determination. The work has mainly contributed to calculating distances to these star clusters via spectroscopic parallax accounting for atmospheric extinction (interstellar extinction has not been accounted for, but we are still looking into it). I have also done work in astrometry/photometry of minor planets and photometry of variable stars.
Question:
I have been asked to come up with a research outline for my senior thesis based off some of the work I have done so far. My professor's have given me the flexibility, however, to choose the direction I take in deciding the actual research topic.
My question to anyone who is interested in astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology is which avenue's of research are open to me with equipment at hand? In other words, can any of you suggest research topics which (seeing permitted :-S ) I could tackle and would be interesting and useful.
At this point the work I have done has been incredibly interesting and satisfying but I haven't found any real use for my data.. Calculating distances isn't incredibly useful at this point (at least that is how I am starting to feel). I would really like to do work that would be worthy of submission/publication to a physics/astronomy journal. Even if that is thinking with my head in the clouds I would simply love to be able to do some more interesting research on some new topics, so if any of you can point me in a direction or give me some advice I would be very grateful. Thank you!
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