open clusters

Goleta Students Use Faulkes Telescope and Win Fourth Place at State Science Fair

The 59th annual California State Science Fair was held on May 17-18, 2010. This year 960 participants represented 394 schools throughout the state and competed for awards totaling over $50,000. Daniel Godinez and Caylin Canales took fourth place in the Junior Physics and Astronomy division. Daniel and Caylin with their teacher Kim Miller from Goleta Valley Junior High, observed the Monoceros R2 cluster with Faulkes Telescope South earlier this year.

Open Clusters Background Information

Discipline: 
Education

An open cluster, sometimes called a Galactic Cluster, is a group of 10s or 100s of stars that were born from the same initial cloud of gas (mainly Hydrogen) and dust. When they are young - a few million or tens of millions of years old - these clusters contain some very large, bright stars (called O or B-type stars). The very youngest clusters (usually less than 10 million years old) often still contain the remains of the gas cloud from which the stars were born – this is seen as nebulosity.

Tags: 
open clusters
photometry

Observing Open Clusters and Making H-R Diagrams

Discipline: 
Education

This guide describes how to create an H-R diagram for an opencluster by measuring the brightness of stars in two colors. You can dothis with sample data available from the Falukes Telescopes, or withdata from your own observation if you have an account. After doing thisactivity you should be able to:

* Use SalsaJ to do photometry for an open cluster in at least 2 colors
* Use a spreadsheet to create a color-magnitude diagram (H-R diagram) for the open cluster
* Describe how the H-R diagram for a cluster gives us information about its age

Tags: 
H-R diagram
open clusters
color-magnitude diagram

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