CLEA Workshop at Gettysburg College, June 2004

• How CCDs work: the good news
• How CCDs work: the not-so-good news
• Short list of a few CCD cameras just to give you an idea of the range of possibilities.
• Basics of CCD data reduction
• Cosmic rays and how to get rid of them

  Good reference material

  • The Aladin tool helps you to make finding charts and access catalogs. It's part of the SIMBAD site .
  • The Astrophysics Data Service lets you search the technical literature for papers on any topic, or by any author.

  Asteroids

  • Vermin of the sky?
  • Example of parallax of an asteroid observed from two locations
  • A student project: measuring parallax to an asteroid (PDF version of a paper by Smallwood, Katz and Richmond, published in American Journal of Physics, Feb 2004, p. 264. Here's a direct link to AJP version of paper
  • If you read through this lecture on asteroids, the final quarter talks about asteroid-related projects you can do with modest equipment.

• Exercise: use a transit of Venus to determine the Astronomical Unit
• Exercise: aperture photometry of a variable star

• During the workshop, I tried using Keith's Image Stacker to make nice pictures from some ToUCam movies I made in May with the 16-inch telescope at the RIT Observatory.
  • a picture of Jupiter
    JPG format
    TIFF format
    PICT format
    PNG format
  • a picture of Saturn
    PICT format

• My notes from last year's CLEA workshop

Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.