Physics 445: Observational Astronomy

This material can be found online at URL

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys445/phys445.html

Instructor

Michael Richmond
Building 76, Office 1274
Office phone: 475-2538
E-mail: mwrsps@rit.edu

Syllabus for the quarter

Class hours

   Tuesday    4:00 -  5:50 pm        76-1230 
   Thursday   4:00 -  5:50 pm        76-1230

Some of our classes will be held in the Imaging Sciences Computer Lab. I'll announce in class when this will occur.

We will also meet several times at night at the RIT Observatory, which is located on John Street, near its intersection with Bailey Road. Look at maps to the Observatory.

This course provides students with the tools they need to plan an observing run for an astronomical target, operate a telescope, acquire digital images with a CCD camera, reduce the images, and analyze the results. At the end of the course, students will carry out a project and write up their results in poster form (and, optionally, make an oral presentation).

Week 1: Basic knowledge of the sky
	Astronomical coordinate systems
	The many different kinds of time
	Magnitudes
	Photometric systems and colors
	Extinction, seeing and other real-life complications
Week 2: Planning an observing run
	Ephemerides and tools for making finding charts
	Astronomical catalogs
	Planetarium programs
Week 3: Telescopes and Cameras
	The RIT telescopes
	Introduction to CCDs
	CCDs: The Dark Side
	Using Windows lab computers to analyze images
Week 4: Noise properties of CCDs
	Sample project ideas (a brief digression)
	Analyzing dark frames from Sep 25, 2003
	Hot pixels and cosmic rays
	Median dark frames
	Finding the background level
Week 5: Image analysis
	Flatfield images
	Aligning and stacking images
Weeks 6: Putting it all together
	Signal versus Noise (some theory)
	Planning an observing run
	Signal versus Noise, with illustrations
	CCD Gain
Week 7: Data Analysis (and observing)
	Simple aperture photometry by hand
	The Typical Reduction Procedure
	Using Perl scripts to align and coadd many images
	Placing CCD photometry on a standard system
	Some basic astrometry
	Measuring proper motion
Week 8: Period analysis and working outside the optical
	Looking for the period
	What if the period isn't quite right?
Week 9: Stuff they don't teach in any courses (and observing)
	The Astronomical Literature
	Poster basics
	Writing your own scientific paper
Week 10: Doing your project

Observing runs

There will be periods during which students will be required to work at the Observatory at night.

April 18 - May 8

Each student will devise a scientific project and figure out what sort of images must be acquired to carry it out. Students will perform most of the work at the Observatory to take the data, for themselves and their colleagues.

Take a look at the calendar for the RIT Observatory in order to reserve time for your project. All students enrolled in the course should be able to access this calendar using their RIT E-mail accounts.

For further information on CCDs, telescopes, and observing ...

• Bill Romanishin's textbook for "Observatory Methods", a course he teaches at Oklahoma University.
• Norman Walker's guide to CCD photometry
• CCD Observing Manual from the American Association of Variable Star Observers.
• Collection of references on photometry collected on the TASS web site.

Other links of interest for this course

• Overview of observational techniques
  • Astronomy 480 Introduction to Data Analysis and Techniques taught at the University of Washington.
  • Bill Keel's lecture notes on astronomical techniques
  • Tycho Brahe's instruments provide a nice contrast with today's devices. Google Books provides another link to this document.
• Statistical techniques
  • Questions about statistical estimates? Perhaps Rene Andrae's guide to error estimation in astronomy might help.
• Asteroids
  • The Minor Planet Center is the first place to go for information on asteroids.
  • List of suspected and known binary asteroids
• Supernovae
  • The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams is the clearinghouse for information on supernovae and other ephemeral objects. For example, you can find the CBAT list of recent supernovae.
  • I keep another list of supernovae
  • Dave Bishop's page of recent bright SNe
• Star Clusters
  • WEBDA Open Cluster site
  • Bill Harris' Catalog of Milky Way Globular Clusters
• Interesting Stars
  • On-line Catalog of Cataclysmic Variable Stars
  • Double Star Section of "Liga Iberoamericana de Astronomma" (LIADA).
  • Eclipsing Binary Ephemerides from the AAVSO
  • Dan Bruton's page on eclipsing binary stars
  • The Nightfall binary-star modeling software
  • The Transitsearch.org search for extrasolar planets
  • Extrasolar planetary system HAT-P-13 may undergo transits some time between April 9 - 23, 2010. This is an opportunity for anyone to contribute important information on extrasolar planets!
• On-line sources of images
  • SkyView
  • SkyMorph
  • The Aladin tool at SIMBAD
  • SDSS SkyServer page

• A link to local copy of Stellarium .dmg for Mac OS X
  • stellarium-0.10.4.dmg
• Finding charts for some targets
  • charts in no particular order
• Tutorial on the XVista package of image processing tools
  • XVista tutorial

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This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Mar 8, 2010.

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