Using Amateur Smartphone Photography to Calculate Luminosity and Temperature of Celestial Objects.

Abstract

Exploration of space does not need to be the exclusive realm of multimillion dollar space telescopes and government funded agencies, the vastness of space and the absolute amount of potential discoveries presents opportunities for amateur astronomers to participate in space exploration.  To provide valuable insights however, the data collected by amateurs needs to be correlative to the professional data.  To that end; the goal of this project is to compare images of celestial objects captured by an amateur astronomer using an iPhone and a commercial telescope to images captured and reported by professional astronomers.  Work presented here will demonstrate that amateur astronomers are capable of contributing to the world of astronomy. Analysis of three stars visible from the northern hemisphere demonstrated that an amateur astronomer could predict the temperature of a star within a 3-50% of the accepted value depending on the distance of the object.  The accuracy of this analysis required the object to be reasonably close to Earth, as the further the star was from the Earth the less reliable the color-temperature analysis was.  This work helps demonstrate that amateur astronomers are capable of contributing to the field of astronomy thus opening opportunities for the expansion of our understanding of celestial objects.