The group BDNYC is going to be presenting at the meeting AAS 235 amazing projects. Checkout the talks, posters and iposters and the dates they are going to be presented.
Click more to see the posters from the group.
BDNYC at AAS 235
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BDNYC at AAS 231
Last January, the group BDNYC was at the meeting AAS 231 presenting amazing projects.
Some news: Eileen Gonzales (graduate student) won the Graduate Student Honorable Mentions in the AAS 231 Chambliss Astronomy Student Achievement Awards competition for her poster! Congratulations Eileen! Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi (Kalbfleisch Postdoctoral Fellow), Ellie Schwab (Helen Fellow, AMNH) and Jackie Faherty (AMNH) presented for the first time in AAS an iPoster. Emily Rice (CSI, AMNH) had a successful Startorialist BOOTHtique with awesome stellar goodies!
Click more to see the posters from the group.
BDNYC at AAS 229
It's time for the 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society! A number of BDNYC members are there to present talks and posters so be sure to check them out! In this post, we list the times and dates. We'll be updating this with links to the posters as well once the conference is over.
In addition to presentations, our own Kelle Cruz is running for AAS Council. You can find her statement here.
BDNYC Summer 2016
Summer is always a special time for BDNYC because it's when we have the most time to dedicate to research and spending time with each other! This summer, the group has students from Hunter College, the College of Staten Island, the Graduate Center, Columbia, and Barnard. I'm also proud to say that the SDSS Faculty and Student Teams (FAST) initiative is now supporting our students in addition to AstroComNYC and our NASA and NSF grants. Things are busy, but we took a second at the end of group meeting yesterday to take a picture:
Stellar Kinematics Application
Determining ages for brown dwarfs is one of the trickiest aspects in our research, yet a very important one as they allow us to estimate masses. One way many researchers estimate ages is by attempting to match the motions of the object to that of stellar moving groups with known ages. A match in XYZ-UVW space can suggest membership which would imply the brown dwarf is coeval with that group. One can calculate XYZ positions and UVW velocities in Python or your favorite programming language. BDNYC is now hosting a stellar kinematics web application that can do this for you.
BDNYC at Cool Stars 19
The 19th meeting of the Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun (aka, Cool Stars) will be taking place in a weeks time and BDNYC will be there! If you'll be joining Cool Stars in Uppsala, Sweden, here are the various places you can meet BDNYC members and learn about our science.
AstrodbWeb
Followers of this blog and our team's scientific endeavors may know we have a curated database of brown dwarfs we work with. An initial version of this database has been published in Filippazzo et al. 2015 and contains information for 198 objects. The database is also maintained on Github, where we welcome contributions from other researchers. We've developed a set of tools for astronomers to work with SQL databases, namely the Python package astrodbkit. This package can be applied to other SQL databases allowing astronomers from all fields of research to manage their data.
Here we introduce a new tool: AstrodbWeb, a web-based interface to explore the BDNYC database.
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BDNYC at MDM
“Maybe previous, but never former - once #BDNYC, always #BDNYC!” - Emily Rice
Written By: Stephanie Douglas
The BDNYC group has been around for a while now, and now some of the older members are in positions to provide new opportunities for the current undergrad crowd. Alejandro Núñez and I both joined BDNYC as undergrads: he as a Hunter College student, I as an NSF-funded REU student at the American Museum of Natural History. Then we both chose to do our graduate work at Columbia University - and with the same advisor, Marcel Agüeros. Our group studies rotation and activity in open cluster stars, and we typically receive 10-14 days of time per year on the 2.4m Hiltner telescope at MDM Observatory to take spectra of stars and study their H-alpha emission. This winter, Alejandro and I offered to take along any BDNYC undergrads who were interested in some hands-on observing experience.
Creating a Database with astrodbkit
NOTE: The information on this post may be outdated. We recommend looking into the up-to-date documentation at trac (internal) and ReadTheDocs.
The astrodbkit package can be used to modify an existing SQL database (such as The BDNYC Database) but it can also be used to create and populate a SQL database from scratch.
To do this, import the BDdb module and create a new database with
from astrodbkit import astrodb
dbpath = '/path/to/new_database.db'
astrodb.create_databse(dbpath)
Then load your new database with
db = astrodb.Database(dbpath)
and start adding tables! The db.table() method accepts as its arguments the table name, list of field names, and list of data types like so:
db.table('my_new_table', ['field1','field2'], ['INTEGER','TEXT'], new_table=True)
Note new_table=True is necessary to create a new table. Otherwise, it looks for an existing table to modify (which you could do as well!).
To populate your new database with data, read the documentation here or a summary at Adding Data to the BDNYC Database.
As always, I recommend the SQLite Browser for a nice GUI to make changes outside of the command line.
Happy databasing!
BDNYC at CUWiP 2016
The Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics, or CUWiP, is a set of simultaneous conferences taking place across the United States and supported by the American Physical Society. A variety of activities take place in the conferences including plenary talks, panel discussions, student posters and talks, workshops, and graduate school and career fairs.
This year, BDNYC members Victoria DiTomasso, Haley Fica, and Ellie Schwab attended CUWiP. Victoria and Ellie attended the conference held at Wesleyan University, while Haley attended the one held at Georgia Institute of Technology. All three presented posters on the research they carry out with BDNYC. You can find copies of the posters below.