So, one of my many jobs is to work in an observatory. Yes, like an astronomy observatory! Everyone say it with me... "SCIENCE RULES (b-b-b-b-b-b-Bill Nye the Science Guy)"

It is quite awesome. I mean, c'mon, I get to work with a huge telescope!
It's "huge" relatively speaking. But it's taller than me when facing straight up, as you can see here

Note the frost on the dome shutters. It's freaking cold in the winter in Michigan, especially at the top of a tower, in an open room!

We actually run two, identical telescopes each night. One is remote/robotically controlled in New Mexico (and is used for research, due to the lack of light pollution in the area of New Mexico it's in), and the other is the one you see in the pictures, the one that's here in Michigan, and is used to help in teaching Astronomy and Science, and is shown to school groups or any members of the public who wish to see the heavens up close!

The upshot of this is that once we have set up for the robot telescope for the night, we just hang out in the dome, running the 'scope for whomever wants to see stuff or learn about astronomy. Often we just get to chat with random people too (hence why one of the telescope's nicknames is "The Nerd Watercooler"). We also get to take cool pictures on whims, if we wish. Like this picture of the Great Nebula in Orion that we took a few weeks ago:
When looking through the lens, you can see colour, but to get a good colour photograph, we would need to take multiple images with different filters specifically designed to highlight certain colours

What does this have to do with statistical outliers, though? Well, there are a number of them present at this job, from it being just such a cool and unique job...
This is the computer program we use to move the telescope. Pick an object in the sky, click, and go!

...to the grand prevalence of red lights everywhere in the dome...
The red light is there because it, unlike white or other types of light, doesn't ruin your night vision.

...to the bizzareness of being in what is essentially mobile architecture...
When the telescope moves, the entire dome rotates. It's like being inside a room where the walls and ceiling spin, and is usually an extremely disorienting experience for people who are in the dome for the first time.

...But the specific outlier whose mysteries I wish to elucidate? Why, it's the week following October 24, 2007.
No, ladies and gentlemen of the grand adventure known as SFØ, i'm not crazy (Well, I am, actually, but not in that way). Take a look at this chart:


This shows a the aforementioned week, as well as a week or so preceding and following it. The X-axis? why, it shows the number of visitors to the observatory each night. Why the spike following October 24, 2007? Because that was the week following the bursting of Comet Holmes. It burst open, spitting dust and gas out of the comet, making it's size and brightness suddenly far brighter than before. It went from a Magnitude of 17 (almost invisible even to our telescope) to Magnitude 2.8 (bright enough to see easily with the naked eye) in the space of a day or two. It was a magnificent sight, and it drew far more visitors than usual for the week of it's best visibility. It really was a once-in-a lifetime opportunity, but guess what? Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can still see it! (well, recordings of it).

The following are videos created using a similar telescope to the one we use. The videos were created by combining multiple pictures of the comet over the course of a few nights. They show the progression as the cloud of gas and dust around the comet grows, eventually making the cloud even bigger than our sun!!

The first shows the comet as a dot at the center of the image (the comet itself was a few kilometers across), and the cloud around it is the dust cloud that made it visible to the naked eye, due to the sunlight reflecting off of the dust.

The second is a brightened set of the same pictures, so that you can see the less visible (to the naked eye) cloud of gas that is even bigger than the dust cloud.

I found this anomaly both by being at the telescope for a number of the nights last year when the comet was bursting, and by seeing while reviewing our logbooks recently that the number of visitors was incredibly high over the course of that week.
The logbooks where we record the numbers of visitors, as well as what's interesting in the sky each night.

Below are a few more images I took of the observatory and such.