The Astronomy Research Seminar, in Conversation with the Teaching Assistants

This article was part of a series by the Board of Student Academic Support Services (SASS) that interviewed OHS course peer tutors about the courses they tutor. You can book an appointment with these peer tutors through the OHS Writing Center, which can be found on the OHS Gateway site. 

SASS: What did you enjoy about the Astronomy Research Seminar?

Umar Ahmed Badami (‘21): The Astronomy Research Seminar is a one-of-its-kind class – it’s literally “out of this world!” One of my favorite parts of the course is its structure – instead of the traditional lecture or debate-style classroom structured around lessons, sessions are based around the students’ collaboration and work. Each class always begins with some form of a “team update,” from one group of students to the others, and every time their peers offer useful feedback which can help guide their progress.

Similarly, the environment of working in a team makes the complicated task of writing a research paper more multifaceted and complete – many project challenges get solved easily when team members work together. I’ve seen many teammates become good friends and collaborators during and even after the seminar. The Astronomy Research Seminar gives students the opportunity to connect with like-minded peers and perform scientific research valuable to the community at large – turning them into real astronomers!

Owen Dugan (‘21): What I enjoyed most about Astronomy Research Seminar was that it allowed astronomy enthusiasts (like me) to work together on a fun project that required planning and teamwork, and which, unlike in most classes, nobody knew the answer to.

SASS: What challenged you the most in the Astronomy Research Seminar? How did you overcome those challenges?

Umar: One of the biggest challenges in the Astronomy Research Seminar is simply understanding your team’s project. It sounds like a simple matter – but each project has many unique aspects to its design. The Seminar follows the traditional research model: question, Google (basically, research), observe, analyze, write, correct – and of course, repeat many times over. Every time, a project quickly turns from a simple result into an extremely complex puzzle.

On one of the first eclipsing binary papers done in the Astronomy Research Seminar, my team had to write many notebooks of Python code essentially from scratch, all to do the simple task of determining the orbital period of two stars – the algorithms themselves were completed quickly, but then arose the natural issue of debugging. A problem teams will perpetually encounter, the need to “debug” occurs when parentheses are forgotten in one of your thousand-plus lines of code, or if your Google Sheet uses the same equation for each of its calculations and you simply can’t figure out why it gives zero every time.

Sometimes, the solutions are simple (“Oh, we swapped out a \ for a / - which made our entire code crash and we had to create another five notebooks which we can’t find in our three new Google Drive accounts”), but working out the answer can frequently result in new papers. Some teams have written double star papers that started out by attempting to verify the orbit of two stars, but in the course of three months completely changed to proving that their orbit does not exist! This process of discovery, turning successes out of quagmires, is what makes the Astronomy Research Seminar so challenging – but at the same time, so much fun!

Owen: I know this might sound cheesy, but it is true: probably the biggest challenge for me was not spending too much time on the course. If I could have, I would have spent much more than three hours a week working on it, so I really had to work hard to get myself to stop and do my other homework (as it was, I did somewhat frequently do more than three hours).

SASS: What tips do you have that could be useful to students taking the Astronomy Research Seminar?

Umar: Read!!! It may sound simple, but this is the key to writing the best papers possible – especially in astronomy. A discipline centered around collaboration, sharing, and innovation, getting up-to-date on your chosen project’s literature is essential. Countless papers may have been written about your project’s field, and it’s important to read as many as possible to get a good idea of how your research should be structured and what its results should be like. It really helps to know what you’ll be writing beforehand – at least, to some degree. It’s also important to find sources that confirm or dispute an argument you put forth in your paper, which provides validity to your claims or facts. Lastly, finding existing data about your object is extremely important as it allows you to cross-check your results – in ten years, the period of your star shouldn’t have sextupled – and can support your data as well. Reading is a virtue – especially in astronomy!

Owen: Astronomy Research Seminar is probably one of the most unusual courses OHS offers. It requires a lot of planning and collaboration, and you also have to be able to figure out what is going on and what you need to do — nobody has done it before, so you are the only person who knows exactly what to do. So my tip would be to keep that in mind.

SASS: About how much time did you spent a week working on assignments and preparing for discussion sessions in the Astronomy Research Seminar?

Umar: It usually depends on the goals for the week. In the beginning of the seminar, students usually spend a few hours each week researching articles and other resources to familiarize themselves with the subject they’ll be spending the term on. As the projects come into view and begin to be worked on, team members usually assign each other tasks to work on, and frequently schedule meetings outside of class to finish their tasks together. Error-finding is a huge part of this, and typically takes the longest time in comparison to other tasks such as writing paper sections or researching additional information. I usually spent at least four hours a week working on my project, which was our weekly assignment, outside of class time. However, as the project began to get more nuanced and experienced issues, I would add a few hours to solve them as well. The Seminar can be time-consuming, but it’s very rewarding!

Owen: Last year, we were required to spend 3 hours a week working on our projects, and they encouraged us not to spend a large amount more than that. I probably spent 3-4 hours a week.

SASS: What was your favorite topic covered in Astronomy Research Seminar?

Owen: Double stars! Last year we focused on double stars (and eclipsing binaries, which are a specific type of double star), but this year, we are expanding the range of topics. For example, this year, I will likely be TAing/overseeing a group that will be working with scientists at JPL to determine how Jupiter’s synchrotron radiation will impact measurements taken using the JUNO spacecraft. As you can see, there are a wide variety of topics that might be covered. Really, anything that is challenging and about astronomy goes!

SASS: What assignments did you enjoy doing in Astronomy Research Seminar?

Owen: There was really only one main assignment: write a paper analyzing a double star. So, that would be my favorite assignment. But, more specifically, my favorite part of that assignment was writing a Python program that uses gradient descent to find the best fit linear solution for the double-star system my team was studying.