Astro

Felix Heightman
December 2023

Values should Abstract: A photometric analysis of the cephied variable star XX Cygni
be quoted with was done using data taken on 28/10/2018 in order to find the distance of XX
Cygni from earth. A light curve was derived from the data to find the apparent
units and with magnitude of the star and then used to find the period of the star which was
proper sig figs found to be 0.13 ±0.006. This in turn was used to find the distance. quote the
distance found
1 Introduction to error here?

Photometry is the process of measuring light from astronomical objects to then

be analysed [1]. The first recognised recordings of basic photometry was a
“many catalogue of stars containing not only their position but also their degree of
advancements brightness. It was done by a Greek mathematician and astronomer Hipparchus
of Nicaca (190-120 BC) [2]. This was the start of the science of photometry and
such as X [cite since then a lot of advancements have been made than simply describing the
X], Y [cite Y]… brightness of stars by eye. The development of telescopes allowed astronomers to
have been see stars which were too faint to see with the naked eye which was a large jump
in analytical capability [2]. The most modern technique uses a device called a
made” CCD (charge coupled device) which was developed in 1969 at bell laboratories
and is currently one of the most advanced techniques to analyse astronomical
objects [2].
This experiment uses data obtained by a CCD to perform a photometric analysis
of several stars with the end goal being to find the distance to the star XX Cygni
which is a dwarf cepheid variable star with a very short orbital period meaning
a data is easily obtainable over a relatively short period of time [3].

2 Theory
There are two di↵erent types of magnitudes describing the brightness of a star.
Apparent magnitude which is how bright the star appears to the observer on
These are … Earth and Absolute magnitude which is the brightness of a star 10 parsecs
away [4]. The equation to find the distance to star is given as:

m M = 5 log(D) 5 (1)
commas and
punctuation on
1
equations (will
not repeat this
comment
elsewhere)
 this is the
continuation of
the sentence
from your
equation Where m is the apparent magnitude M is the absolute magnitude and D is the
distance in parsecs [3]. comma
Through photometry the apparent magnitude can be found by analysing photos
strange phrase to taking by a CCD. However how to find absolute magnitude is less obvious when
_take_ a ccd. the distance to the star is unknown. Thankfully since it is known that XX Cygni
Maybe “take is a cepheid variable star this can help to calculate the absolute magnitude since
cephied variables have certain intrinsic properties such as their luminosity being
iamges with” related to their period which is given by: [5].
SPAG
cite a source which M = [2.76(log10(P ) 1.0)] 4.16 (2)
defines cepheid
variable stars. Where M is the absolute magnitude and P is the period in days [5].

probably [2]
3 Method _the python programming language_ (not snakes)
Data being used was photographs of the night sky taken with the University
“The data” of Exter telescope by astrophysics students on the 22/10/2018. All of the data
analysis, photos and figures created were done using python. The first step was
to remove any very low quality images where the stars were not distinguishable
or the background night sky had been a↵ected too much by light pollution.
There were 854 total photos taken each were individually looked at to find
defective images. A flat field photo is one which aims to have the same brightness “uniform
across the whole photo this way the photo is an accurate representation of what
is being seen rather than any inaccuracies of the camera. The next process is
brightness”
normalising then combining all the flat field images to create a normalised even
background of the night sky. This is then applied to each of the images. As can
be seen in figure 1, in the flat field image the light is more evenly distributed, Save this
there is less light concentrated at the centre and more in the corners. Although sentence for
it is not a perfect background the stars are very clearly visible.
discussion
Restucture from “A flat field…”.
Your selection process is still heuristic - you need to
Introduce the point which is to apply
specify in more detail how you deem a picture good
corrective post-processing to the
enough to use.
raw images. This is done using a
flat field photo. “A flat field photo….”

2
 Figure 1: Flatfield vs raw image of night sky

In your figure caption, tell the

3 reader what you
would like to know. I will not re-comment this on
other figures but it applies.

Also label your x and y axes as pixel number.

 The next step is to apply another post-processing What specific change is
routine to correct for the fact that the night sky this? brightness? light
changes…. pollution?
The next step is to convert the pixel coordinates to sky coordinates. This
is necessary because the night sky changes during the night and the tracking of one sentence in
“the python the telescope is not accurate enough to pinpoint targets. This was done using
astropy and https://astrometry.net/. The photos taken are compared to an
1st person
package…”
enormous database of known star positions. The image can then e↵ectively be plural when
remapped using star coordinates instead of pixel coordinates. Once all this is everything else
done we are now in a position to try to identify our target star XX Cygni and
no links in main some calibrator stars. This was done from a database of stars, the brightest ones
is not good
text. put it as a from the list were chosen and of course XX Cygni. These stars were then located grammar.
on a photo of the night sky and depending on their position were included or rephrase!
citation and include omitted.
more detail in the wrong tone for a report. say “including XX Cygni”
citation than just
the link!

“omitted, as
shown in Fig.
2”

mention above that

the brightest stars
are used to
calibrate the
position of XX
Cygni. This is Figure 2: Target stars “later in the XXX section”
missin in your
previous All the calibrator stars and XX Cygni are circled above in figure 2. A total of 7
calibrator stars were used, there are more stars circled than this as some were
explanation. omitted from the data due to either poor positioning on the photograph such as
BD+58 2043 or very large errors which can be seen later in the data analysis.
Now we know what stars we will be analysing it is necessary to define the
aperture we will be using for photometry. This step is important as only the

1st person plural again. Pick a lane, either

4 “we” i.e. personal writing, or 3rd person
singlar i.e. impersonal writing.
 selected reference stars - be specific

light from the star should be used for the photometry in order to avoid errors
in measurement such as light from another star being included in the aperture.
The apertures for each star are shown below:

This belongs Figure 3: Defined apertures for XX cygni and calibrator stars
in the figure.
The red circles show the aperture that will be used to measure the flux of
great the star. The inner yellow circle is the inner radius and the outer yellow circle
description. is the outer radius used to measure the backround flux of the sky.
Now everything is set up to perform the photometry. This is done by firstly analysis
summing the counts in each of the pixels that fall within each aperture using
a python package called photoutils. Then the background flux needs to be
subtracted so that the only flux in the measurement is due to the target. Now
the counts have been established these need to be converted to flux and then
flux to apparent magnitude. Finally now we have the apparent magnitude we
can plot this against time to get the light curves of the target stars as shown
below:

some maths here

would be nice if you
have time

5
the offset which comes from what? the things we
have corrected for or something new? The fact
that these curves need calibrating suggests
something new… explain it if this is the case!

Figure 4: instrumental magnitude of target stars over time

Finally these light curves need to be calibrated by taking into account the
o↵set so that they are in the standard form for magnitudes. The calibrated light
curves are shown below:

tell the reader

what to look for
by comparing
this with Fig.4 Figure 5: Calibrated magnitudes of target stars

Now that we have the calibrated light curve of XX Cygni we can find the
period and then use this to find the distance to the star as described in the

6
 can just say in the theory section

theory section using equation 2 and re-arranged equation 1. Which now has the
form: m M +5
d = 10 5 (3)

4 Results
The light curve of XX Cygni shows the variation in magnitude over time as can
be seen below:
in fig. 6

error should be
Figure 6: XX Cygni calibrated light curve quoted to the same
number of sig figs
The period here was found to be 0.13 ±6 ⇥ 10 4 days. The blue horizontal
line is to find 2 points in phase so it is exactly one period. These two points are
the first and last intersections with the XX Cygni light curve. Using equations
2 and 3 the absolute magnitude was found to be 1.046 ±5.5 ⇥ 10 3 and the this one is
distance was found to be 1139.7 ±52.55 parsecs. perfect! just
quote error range for formatting -
5 Discussion known value space the error
The accepted value for the period of XX Cygni is 0.135 days [6]. Compare this
the same as the
to the calculated value of 0.13 ±6 ⇥ 10 4 our results seem to agree with the number
already known values of period with only a 4 percent di↵erence between our
calculated and the expected value. The accepted value for the distance to XX
Cygni is 1080 pc [7] and once again our results seem to agree with the expected
value with only a 5.5 percent di↵erence between the two. The greatest source
of error for the apparent magnitude would most likely be light pollution and

7
Explain your reasoning here. this sentence does not
connect with the last!
image quality. The first half of the photos taken had much more obscurity to
them than the last half of the images. Another consideration is that as the
evening progresses and the night sky moves so do the centre of the photos and
so it is possible some of the calibrator stars were out of the frame. This was the This part is
reason star TYC 3948-2018-1 was removed from the data set as the errors were great! More of
extremely large and there were some breaks in the light curve that did not occur
for the rest of the stars. In addition to this the absolute magnitude calculation
this!
uses a standard formula for all Cepheid variables as they all follow the same
trend however they do not behave exactly the same as each other which could
lead to some of the di↵erence between the calculated value of distance and the
expected value.

6 Conclusion
Overall the results calculated had relatively low errors and agreed with the
expected values, meaning none of the factors talked about in the discussion
were not large enough to massively skew the results of the experiment. However
the largest source of uncertainty was most likely the quality of the first half of
the images. It is possible when the photographs were being taken the exposure
was set wrong for the first half and then corrected once it was noticed it was mention what you
slightly wrong. would do if you were
to repeat the
References experiment. How
[1] [Casagrande, Luca; VandenBerg, Don A (2014). ”Synthetic stellar photom-would you improve it?
etry - General considerations and new transformations for broad-band sys- What would you
tems”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Oxford Univer- change?
sity Press. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.444..392C]

[2] [Richard Miles, ”A light history of photometry: from Hipparchus to the

Hubble Space Telescope July 2007.” The Journal of the British Astronomical
Association, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234328026_
A_light_history_of_photometry_from_Hipparchus_to_the_Hubble_
Space_Telescope ]

[3] [University of Exeter, year 2 labs information booklet. accessed 10/12/2023]

[4] [Kansas state university, accessed 10/12/2023. https://www.phys.ksu.
edu/personal/wysin/astro/magnitudes.html]
[5] University of West Kentucky astronomy labs, accessed 10/12/2023. http:
//astro.wku.edu/labs/m100/PLrelation.html
[6] [THE NATURE OF THE DWARF CEPHEID XX CYGNI MICHAEL D.
JONER. accessed 12/12/2023,]

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[7] [Distance and Radius of the Dwarf Cepheid XX Cygni Hong, Jung-Ho (Na-
tional Astronomical Observatory) ; Kim, Chul-Hee (National Astronomical
Observatory) ; Joner, Michael D. (Department of Physics and Astronomy,
Brigham Young University) Published : 1985.12.31, accessed 12/12/2023
.https://koreascience.kr/article/CFKO198523855320672.pdf]