Week 8: Actually Applying Corrections Using Standard Stars, Extinction, Final Graphs

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to my blog! In last week’s post, I detailed my experiences working with standard stars. I had already extracted the magnitudes of my two standard stars, but I found the wrong apparent magnitude value (the value I got from Sky Map was for another light band). 

Standard Stars (again):

I spent most of my Monday perusing different online databases. One of the biggest is the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which I used to find some preliminary information about my galaxy. Sadly, that avenue quickly closed up when I couldn’t find them at all after a few hours of searching.

Eventually, I found information about my standard stars using the SIMBAD Astronomical Database, which listed out the different apparent magnitudes for each band of light. 

So, I finally managed to apply my standard star corrections! This drastically lowered the amount of outliers. 

The next step I did was to use extinction (the dust/gas which scatters light) to further correct my data. I found the extinction coefficient on NED, and subtracted it from all my magnitudes to get this graph:

https://ibb.co/xSknkg8

As you can see, it looks a lot neater, which indicates that my process was done correctly (my previous blogs showcase messier, uncorrected-for graphs). Now, it’s time to jump into the calculations behind obtaining a distance value.

Thank you for reading my blog, and I’ll see you all next time!