Nuffield Bursary project - Photometry of stellar clusters

Both Vivek Chidambaram (2009) and Shan Yang (2010) undertook their Nuffield Bursary placement at the NTU observatory during July and August. Their project involved studying the brightness and colours of stars in the open clusters (e.g. M 34).

The results from this project show how the brightness and colour of stars are distributed. Astronomers can use this information to determine the age of stars.

Vivek also observed another open cluster of stars with fellow student Rui Wang on 30 July 2009; this cluster is known as NGC 7086.