Published: January 26, 2015
Mr. Armstrong writes:
I'm teaching at UH Maui College. (I taught there Fall semester 2014, and Fall 2013, as well as this semester). It is nice to have another area where I have done some research to make star formation a bit more real. (Estimate 60 students impacted per semester.)
I have been working with a student, Celeste Jongeneelen, who just started high school. Celeste has been working on identifying Ae/Be stars in young open clusters. She has been using APT to make color-color diagrams, and identify potential candidates. Last year and the year before she made it to semi-finalist in the Broadcom Science competition. Last year she also won first place for the junior division at the Maui County Science and Engineering Fair. This year we started working with the spectrograph on the Faulkes Telescopes to verify candidates. The observations we got two nights ago indicate that she has found a previously unknown Ae/Be star in NGC 663. I'm having an expert look at the observations to confirm.
I'm also working with Sydney Gilbert, who attended AAS in Long Beach. Sydney is working on some double star research which we hope will contribute to better determination of the masses of K and M stars.