Katie (Wheaton Warrenville South High School)
Mentor: Brian Yanny
This summer I worked with Linux, the VI editor, and the programming language Python, which is actually my first computer language. In the beginning, I spent a lot of time with my mentor, learning some of the necessary astronomical information. I then started out making simple plots with the data from the paper "Galactoseismology: Discovery of Vertical Waves in the Galactic Disc" (the paper my summer work was based on), One major thing I did was finding exactly where in the sky the data was taken from, using the galactic coordinates l and b. I also worked on looking at the main sequence of well-known star clusters, such as Messier 67. I did this by plotting (G-r) 0, a color measurement (green light minus dereddened (corrected for dust) red light) versus r0, the apparent magnitude, or how bright the star looks from Earth (atmospheric interference is corrected for).
Eventually I moved to learning how to pull data out of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) website, using the query language SQL. Every time I pulled data out of the SDSS, I would make a (G-r) 0, versus r0 plot to check the colors. I then took a very small slice of the data (only stars of 16 < r0 < 18 , and then only 170 < l < 180, which is about 1/12th of the data) and made a histogram of (G-r) 0. I then decided to take the entire data set, break it up into chunks of 15 degree increments and compared the top and bottom boxes to ultimately find that there is a large shift in color, the bottom box is consistently more red than the top.