Development of Different Skynet Systems for Gravitational Wave Research and Astronomy Education (2023)

Undergraduate: Logan Selph

Faculty Advisor: Daniel Reichart
Department: Physics and Astronomy

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Over the course of the summer and my fall semester, our project focused on two main goals: to prepare our telescopes for 2023 VIRGO/LIGO gravitational run, and to develop tools for use by students and scientists alike in Skynet’s afterglow image editing software. Work on the former began in the summer of 2022, where I assisted in repairing and upgrading telescopes at our site in Chile, which had not been touched since before the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Optical Gravitational Wave observations will be crucial in measuring the inclination of optical GW events, which is necessary to derive and confirm Hubble's constant from gravitational waves. Since the delay of the LIGO/VIRGO O4 run, I have been able to work on two projects focused on developing tools for afterglow. The first of these two projects aimed to help fix the problem of broken columns and hot/cold pixels in the images being created by some of our telescopes. The resulting pixel-by-pixel algorithm has seen great success in both accuracy and speed, and we are currently developing a systems paper to accompany its integration into afterglow. Second, we began work on a color scaling algorithm that would allow students to scale the colors in images taken by our radio telescope (or any other radio telescope) to the colors they would see if their eyes worked in that part of the spectrum. This tool is working, and, following testing, will be added to afterglow to accompany the radio astronomy segment of MWU courses taught at Universities across America.

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