HotPopRobot

On 7 July 2018, our Maker Family was awarded the Jesse Ketchum Award by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Toronto.

The Jesse Ketchum Award is presented to members who have done considerable work in the construction and/or application of equipment suitable for astronomical observation.

We received the Award for our project: Solar-X for measuring the changes occurring during the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. In particular we measured the changes occurring in temperature, visible light, infrared, ultraviolet and solar output.

Solar-X had a built-in power source, SD card data storage, and real-time clock. This meant it ran autonomously while we took other observations during the eclipse.

We had collected over 20,000 data lines with over 140,000 individual measurements using Solar-X. We used Excel for analyzing the data. We used statistical tools to remove the extraneous readings and reduce the errors in our analysis.

The Analysis from our Solar-X experiment received front-page coverage in the Toronto Metro newspaper and other publications.

For more details about our project, our data, results, and conclusions, go to https://hotpoprobot.com/2017/11/14/findings-from-2017-total-solar-eclipse-via-solar-x/

On the day of the 20th Annual Awards Picnic of the Toronto Centre, held at the Carr Astronomical Observatory, Collingwood, Ontario we also gave a presentation on Trappist-1  and its seven planets, all of which could fit into the orbit of Mercury without crashing into one another. By speeding up the orbits, we were able to associate each one with a note and translate these notes into music and light.

You can watch the project presentation below:

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