Project Background, Introduction, and Tools:
At UW, my adviser for the early part of the summer was Dr. Chip Kobulnicky, and my advisers for the remainder of the summer were senior graduate students Chris Rodgers and Brian Uzpen.
My research project for the summer was to study the open cluster NGC 6405 (M6) to determine its reddening, distance modulus, and age, and to increase knowledge of cluster membership (previous studies go to about 14th magnitude, and this study goes to about 16th magnitude). The main purpose for me of increasing the knowledge of cluster membership is to enable cluster members to be researched for possible circumstellar disks, a part of Brian's thesis.
I used short and long UBVRI images taken by Chris on the night of March 17, 2006, with the 1-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
To carry out my work, I made extensive use of several IRAF packages -- CCDRED (CCD reductions), DAOPHOT (point spread function photometry), and PHOTCAL (standard star solutions; converting from instrumental magnitude) -- and IDL (interactive data language, used for coordinate conversions/matching and plotting). I also used Philip Massey's IRAF scripts for CTIO's 1-meter telescopes's CCD, the Y4KCam, which combines four 2032x2032 pixel chips to make a 4064x4064 pixel detector (plus overscan regions). His scripts trim and subtract the overscan regions (there are four, one per chip), simplifying this process.
Here is a RGB image of NGC 6405 made with TCTOOL (three color tool) in IDL. The exposures are 10 seconds each in Johnson I (red), R (green), and B (blue).
To see what I found, go HERE.
Here is a 60-second Johnson I filter image of NGC 6405 which shows the density of the cluster:
Here is a list of most of the websites I used:
specific to my project:
Philip Massey's Y4KCam reduction site
generally useful:
Go HOME.