Astronomy C

[Adi1008]

Here's my Astronomy test from the recent Katy Regional Tournament, held at Beckendorff Junior High (key). If you have any questions about it, feel free to PM or email me!

Are there any rules or regulations for high schoolers to be event supervisors? Or do you just apply / ask like anybody else with an application?

The tournament was looking for someone to write an astronomy test and reached out to local science olympiad teams (e.g. Seven Lakes). As someone who likes both astronomy and writing tests, I volunteered to write the astronomy test.

Are there any rules or regulations for high schoolers to be event supervisors? Or do you just apply / ask like anybody else with an application?

I don't know how it is in Illinois (though likely mroe formal than in other areas) but many regionals are sufficiently short on event supervisors that they'll pretty much take any adult with a pulse, and any high schooler who's sufficiently competent. However, I've not heard of someone writing a regional test for their own division before.

Nice test btw Adi; I scored 26/37 on the first part, and 13/26 on the second part (I completely flipped 7a through 7d and lost 8 points there ugh). How does that compare?

In general, Texas has a shortage of event supervisors (but the event supervisors we have are pretty great and try their best!), so for small tournaments like this, students will help out. KRT specifically makes sure that all 23 national events are held which is fairly uncommon for Texas regionals (UT is another one that has all 23 events).

The top score was in the mid 20s out of a total of 63, so compared to them, you did well.

It's not unheard of to see high schoolers supervising B division with adult oversight at lower levels of competition, but I'd be leery of them doing their own division considering conflicts of interest, content area and assessment expertise, ES experience, or what have you. My guess would be that Adi wrote the test, passed it to a proctor, and didn't compete in the event at that tournament. If not, well...the world's a big place.

Your guess is correct; I only wrote the test and passed it on to an adult proctor. I had a conflict that day where I missed a few hours of the tournament when the event was taking place, so even if I wanted to actually administer the test, I wouldn't be able to.

Seven Lakes and Beckendorff don't compete in KRT, but rather, go to other regional tournaments (Seven Lakes went to TAMUG for Regionals, and Beckendorff is going to UT-Austin)

[raxu]

We've been trying the Princeton Invitational Astronomy test, and it has been near-impossible... Are questions about other stellar classification systems, fusion, eccentricity of systems, and somewhat-random facts normal on a State/National level test?

[antoine_ego]

We've been trying the Princeton Invitational Astronomy test, and it has been near-impossible... Are questions about other stellar classification systems, fusion, eccentricity of systems, and somewhat-random facts normal on a State/National level test?

I can't speak for State level tests because they typically vary a lot depending on the state. However, the Princeton test was a bit too difficult, especially since Calculus was required for some of the math questions. I wouldn't expect of anything as trivia-based as the Princeton test. That being said, you should know a great deal about classification systems, eccentricity, etc, because those could most certainly pop up on a Nationals test. If you want a good approximation of the Nationals test, look at the MIT invite test, since they were written by the same people.

[Unome]

We've been trying the Princeton Invitational Astronomy test, and it has been near-impossible... Are questions about other stellar classification systems, fusion, eccentricity of systems, and somewhat-random facts normal on a State/National level test?

I can't speak for State level tests because they typically vary a lot depending on the state. However, the Princeton test was a bit too difficult, especially since Calculus was required for some of the math questions. I wouldn't expect of anything as trivia-based as the Princeton test. That being said, you should know a great deal about classification systems, eccentricity, etc, because those could most certainly pop up on a Nationals test. If you want a good approximation of the Nationals test, look at the MIT invite test, since they were written by the same people.

Note, the Nationals test is generally significantly harder than the MIT test, though not as hard as the Princeton test. The Nationals test also uses obscure knowledge in application-based question, as opposed to how Princeton was more about spitting out obscure knowledge (most of which were directly from Wikipedia, so it shouldn't have been too hard if you had a laptop).

[antoine_ego]

I wonder what the Nationals test will be like. Is it just me or is this topic a lot easier than last year in terms of math?

[Ashernoel]

I wonder what the Nationals test will be like. Is it just me or is this topic a lot easier than last year in terms of math?

Yea that's what my partner the math guy told me too. So that's fun

[syo_astro]

Technically this is a science competition, so the math is never supposed to be particularly hard . At the same time, algebra, units, and graph reading surprisingly or not does result in many mistakes, so...

[Avogadro]

Technically this is a science competition, so the math is never supposed to be particularly hard . At the same time, algebra, units, and graph reading surprisingly or not does result in many mistakes, so...

Science = math

Or at least when literally every event you do has a lot of math, at least. I guess I might be speaking from a bit of a biased standpoint.

So once one has exhausted the first page of Google for every concept and object, what would you all recommend going towards? Any textbook recommendations?

[syo_astro]

I am staunchly opposed to the idea that science = math. But then I am also biased, just in the opposite direction . I just figure when you can have a class mostly about observations and concepts that logically come from those observations, science isn't just math...of course I'm not saying math is unrelated to science, but science is certainly not *purely* math (as your equals sign might imply ).

The 1st page of google for every *concept*? The concepts sometimes can have quite a bit of depth depending on what search terms you use! In fact, varying up search terms and looking at the first 3 - 5 links sometimes gets you more than just a basic search. One specific tip is you can look at research papers if you're looking for new concepts or ways of looking at objects (it takes practice, but mainly just read the abstract/intro/conclusion).

[Unome]

Question: why do higher-mass stars have the radiative layer outside the convective layer while low(er) mass stars are the opposite?