Astronomy C

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Re: Astronomy C

Post by PKinakin »

This is a bit off topic, it's just I'm wondering if Food Science would fall under this section, and if it does if I should make the forum.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by gz839918 »

PKinakin wrote: December 6th, 2020, 5:03 pm This is a bit off topic, it's just I'm wondering if Food Science would fall under this section, and if it does if I should make the forum.
Only staff members are able to create forum threads for events, but you can find the Food Science thread under Lab Events. We classify it as a lab event because of the salinometer testing, which means it's not purely a test-based event. Hope that helps!
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by Assassinator »

Anyone know anything about the Bullet Cluster? This should be the easiest one because it actually has a wikipedia page unlike a lot of the quasars.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by RiverWalker88 »

Aaaand the Chandra UnOfficial Archive is dead again
Hopefully, I'm falsely calling wolf on this one, and it's going to come back soon enough. Right now, the issue is that the archive is redirecting to another page, which is a 404 error. Even if there is a workaround for this one too, though, it unfortunately appears that the UnOfficial archive is no longer well supported, and we're in need of a slightly more permanent solution. Here's a way to do the same thing the UnOfficial archive did, but with a bit more hassle (if you have an Observation ID, or ObsID, already, skip to step 3).
  1. Search for the object name on this (apparently) supported Chandra archive. Unfortunately, we've lost a couple of search features here: we can no longer directly search for an ObsID (which we won't need anymore anyway), and we can't search for an author or title key. On the upside, though, we can preview each image, and see the area of sky that the image covers, so there's at least some improvement there.
  2. Locate the image you want, and find the ObsID of the image (by default, it is in the leftmost column).
  3. Copy the link https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/cdaftp/byobsid/[LASTDIGIT]/[OBSID]/primary/ into your browser, replacing [LASTDIGIT] with the last digit of the ObsID (for example, for an ObsID of 1490, you would use 0), and [OBSID] with the ObsID. This will now take us to the familiar page where the files for the object are listed.
Hopefully this solution will keep working on into the future, and this won't wind up being quite as inconsistent as the UnOfficial Chandra Archive has been recently.

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Last edited by RiverWalker88 on March 23rd, 2021, 8:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by EKT26 »

Would keeping up with astronomy current events be a decent way to predict DSOs? I've only done this event last year and this year so I've had roughly the same set twice.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by syo_astro »

EKT26 wrote: April 14th, 2021, 3:18 pm Would keeping up with astronomy current events be a decent way to predict DSOs? I've only done this event last year and this year so I've had roughly the same set twice.
I should probably let others post but eh, on here anyway. Hello fellow astronomy person! A little insight that DSOs are...somewhat difficult to predict.

Shorter answer is it may give a tip to 1 or 2 but likely won't get you all of them.
Longer answer: Usually a portion of DSOs come from famous or prototypical astronomical sources (surprisingly a lot of possibilities for that), a portion come from rarer/odder objects (e.g. from papers or even yes objects in the news). Some topics are also specific enough to get better ideas from the news, though. Like gravitational waves this year probably has a far shorter list of objects to pick, while reading news about galaxies would give millions of possibilities...good luck guessing. So with all the possibilities, I found news helped more to learn vocab and generic aspects of the rules if you do it without knowing the DSOs. Not a bad thing, I think it helped me when competing.
(others can feel free to add their takes of course)
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by Jehosaphat »

For me, it has always been pretty random. Other than massive breakthroughs like M87's black hole image, you would be finding a needle in a haystack in order to predict what DSOs will be on next year's list. Generally you should be able to find everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone, so I would not worry about trying to figure out what they are in advance.

I have had some tests with stuff from astronomy news about DSOs that were nowhere in the rules, but you kinda just have to roll with the punches there.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by Adi1008 »

Jehosaphat wrote: April 15th, 2021, 11:27 am For me, it has always been pretty random. Other than massive breakthroughs like M87's black hole image, you would be finding a needle in a haystack in order to predict what DSOs will be on next year's list. Generally you should be able to find everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone, so I would not worry about trying to figure out what they are in advance.

I have had some tests with stuff from astronomy news about DSOs that were nowhere in the rules, but you kinda just have to roll with the punches there.
I agree that the DSOs each year are difficult to predict outside of big events like M87/EHT or the discovery of gravitational waves. When we pick DSOs, we generally try to have a mix of "classic examples", "interesting" objects that highlight something unusual or meaningful about that class of objects, and a couple of objects that hint at the direction the event may take over the next few years, among other things. On top of that, there isn't a set rotation for the topics.

However, I strongly disagree with the idea that "everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone". As a competitor, I remember Wikipedia being one of the least useful resources out there for DSOs, and I relied mostly on sources like Chandra/Hubble/ESO/etc and research papers instead. All in all, I don't think Wikipedia is that useful in this event when you're taking a well-written test anyways.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by Jehosaphat »

Adi1008 wrote: April 16th, 2021, 4:05 pm
Jehosaphat wrote: April 15th, 2021, 11:27 am For me, it has always been pretty random. Other than massive breakthroughs like M87's black hole image, you would be finding a needle in a haystack in order to predict what DSOs will be on next year's list. Generally you should be able to find everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone, so I would not worry about trying to figure out what they are in advance.

I have had some tests with stuff from astronomy news about DSOs that were nowhere in the rules, but you kinda just have to roll with the punches there.
I agree that the DSOs each year are difficult to predict outside of big events like M87/EHT or the discovery of gravitational waves. When we pick DSOs, we generally try to have a mix of "classic examples", "interesting" objects that highlight something unusual or meaningful about that class of objects, and a couple of objects that hint at the direction the event may take over the next few years, among other things. On top of that, there isn't a set rotation for the topics.

However, I strongly disagree with the idea that "everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone". As a competitor, I remember Wikipedia being one of the least useful resources out there for DSOs, and I relied mostly on sources like Chandra/Hubble/ESO/etc and research papers instead. All in all, I don't think Wikipedia is that useful in this event when you're taking a well-written test anyways.
Yeah the official agency sites will always have the best information, but about everything I’ve seen on a test this year has been so unbelievably surface level any in-depth research has been useless. Hopefully states will be better, but so far it’s been a little bit of a let down because the test quality has sucked for Astronomy in my area.
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Re: Astronomy C

Post by RiverWalker88 »

Jehosaphat wrote: April 18th, 2021, 7:18 am
Adi1008 wrote: April 16th, 2021, 4:05 pm
Jehosaphat wrote: April 15th, 2021, 11:27 am For me, it has always been pretty random. Other than massive breakthroughs like M87's black hole image, you would be finding a needle in a haystack in order to predict what DSOs will be on next year's list. Generally you should be able to find everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone, so I would not worry about trying to figure out what they are in advance.

I have had some tests with stuff from astronomy news about DSOs that were nowhere in the rules, but you kinda just have to roll with the punches there.
I agree that the DSOs each year are difficult to predict outside of big events like M87/EHT or the discovery of gravitational waves. When we pick DSOs, we generally try to have a mix of "classic examples", "interesting" objects that highlight something unusual or meaningful about that class of objects, and a couple of objects that hint at the direction the event may take over the next few years, among other things. On top of that, there isn't a set rotation for the topics.

However, I strongly disagree with the idea that "everything you could every need to know about the DSOs on the wikipedia page alone". As a competitor, I remember Wikipedia being one of the least useful resources out there for DSOs, and I relied mostly on sources like Chandra/Hubble/ESO/etc and research papers instead. All in all, I don't think Wikipedia is that useful in this event when you're taking a well-written test anyways.
Yeah the official agency sites will always have the best information, but about everything I’ve seen on a test this year has been so unbelievably surface level any in-depth research has been useless. Hopefully states will be better, but so far it’s been a little bit of a let down because the test quality has sucked for Astronomy in my area.
I've found that a lot of astronomy is some grey superposition of these two points. I agree that Wikipedia is pretty useless as far as DSO research goes, it tends to have far less useful information than press releases do, and is is mainly useful for the basic fact file it gives (that pretty much ends up on this wiki anyway). However, it tends to be difficult for an ES that isn't very knowledgeable in astronomy to do much more than Wikipedia (they don't necessarily know that the Chandra website exists), so sometimes that's all you are going to need.

Not just for the DSOs, this event in general, I've found, is one of the least consistent in that it can be extremely difficult, a fun challenge, or a pretty huge let-down, and there is no way to know which one you are going to come across. I have utmost respect for an ES; they are volunteering their time so that I can compete in this event, and I am grateful no matter what. I know that they are not intentionally making an exam that is too surface-level or too easy. However, I feel like this event can be just as difficult for an ES as the participant, so we just always see the huge quality swing, and depending on who writes it, Wikipedia might be more than enough, or might be as useful as accidentally bringing in the Ornithology binder to the Astronomy event.

ON ANOTHER NOTE...
The Chandra Unofficial Archive is back up!!!!!! New link: https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/archive/chandra/search .
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