Day 16

Today, we visited the space weather lab in the morning. It was cool and they said that they are predicting when a "storm" will hit mars in the near future. Afterwards, I spent the morning finding possible widely separated companion stars to V4046 sgr, TW Hya, T Cha, and MP Mus using Topcat. I have to download tables from the 2mass catolog and the PPMXL catolog (using the VizieR catalogue service), and then manipulate/match them to find all possible companion stars. During lunch, we watched a movie about presenting and using Powerpoint. It was very interesting and I hope I remember some of it for when I start creating my final presentation! After lunch, Joel realized that the PPMXL catalog I was using to find the proper motions of the possible companion stars was untrustworthy, so he instructed me to try using two other catalogs (Tycho-2 and UCAC2). Of course, just as I was finishing this process, he realized that I shouldn't be using those either! So I had to go back through one more time using the UCAC3 catalog which (I hope) is the correct one.