Tabby's Star

In May 2019, under the supervision of Dr Melodi Rodrigue, Jacob Fausett defended his Masters thesis, which was based solely around the GBO. Jacob’s thesis included nightly GBO monitoring of “Tabby’s star”, a very unusual star that shows highly irregular variations in its brightness. Jacob’s dense monitoring with the GBO provided a valuable resource for understanding the cause of this star’s unusual flux variations, and his data will contribute to a larger collaboration of scientists working on this star. Jacob produced an automated pipeline to calibrate each night’s data and to perform photometry, which he ran every morning. His pipeline can easily be adapted by future generations of students for other projects.