Day 2 of intensive research! During the morning staff meeting, Mr. Callens brought in donuts for everyone, which proved to be a helpful snack during the programming that took up my entire day. As I was able to get the prototype of my program to work with the Sample Data of 800 lines, I figured it was time to try the real data on the code...A rather bad idea. Since I wasn't sure how the code would handle 1000 times as much as data as the sample, it was a hit or miss situation. Sadly, the first 5 runs were all misses. As each run took upwards of 55 minutes, I was only able to test the code 5 times, making corrections after every run.
The result:
I found 7773 stars that can be accurately analyzed, which was consistent in every run. However, the program found the standard deviation for 35000+ stars, hinting at a repetition somewhere in the code. After lunch I realized there were stars with similar coordinates in the data, so I changed my program to check for more than just identical RA and Dec. This reduced the number of assigned standard deviations to 7822, still 49 too many. The next three runs did not change anything, leaving me frustrated. Only after sleeping over it did I find repetition in the actual data, something my program cannot account for.
The result:
I found 7773 stars that can be accurately analyzed, which was consistent in every run. However, the program found the standard deviation for 35000+ stars, hinting at a repetition somewhere in the code. After lunch I realized there were stars with similar coordinates in the data, so I changed my program to check for more than just identical RA and Dec. This reduced the number of assigned standard deviations to 7822, still 49 too many. The next three runs did not change anything, leaving me frustrated. Only after sleeping over it did I find repetition in the actual data, something my program cannot account for.