Observational Astronomy (308)

These notes are brief summaries and links for the in-class content for the Monday class meetings of the Fall Semester 2019. Class content is currently on our Moodle server. If you are enrolled in 308, please see your Blackboard class for links to the content for this term.

Week 1 (August 19)

• Orientation to the class
• Purpose, activities, outcomes
• Visiting the observatory
• Remote observing
• Semester projects
• Facilities and research
• On-line with Mt. Kent live session

Week 2 (August 26)

• What we observe
  • Position and celestial coordinates
  • Flux and magnitude
• What we infer
  • Distance
  • Size
  • Luminosity
  • Composition
  • Evolution
• Useful tools for access to data
  • Stellarium
  • Simbad
  • Aladin
  • Calsky

Week 3 (September 2)

• Labor Day holiday

Week 4 (September 9)

• Telescopes
  • Basic concepts of optical telescope design
  • Light gathering function
  • Focal plane scale
  • Angular resolution and point spread function
  • Detectors and filters

• Visit to the Planetarium
  • Solar projection telescope
  • Solar imaging in hydrogen alpha light

Week 5 (September 16)

• Telescopes continued from last week as needed

• Examples: Epsilon Lyrae (Double Double) see https://www.astro.louisville.edu/shared_skies/archive/select/stars/lyra/epsilon_lyrae/20060909/

Week 6 (September 23)

• Clear weather tonight possible (Monday) and the coming weekend

• Roundtable discussion about project ideas (bring your own) such as
  • Jupiter imaging (must be done soon)
  • Bright star photometry (examples are some TESS candidates and zeta Andromedae now)
  • Use of latest CMOS color sensors for photometry
  • Other TESS candidates (TESS is currently observing the northern sky)
  • Variable stars in the TESS public data
  • Comets http://www.aerith.net/comet/weekly/current.html
  • Supernovae http://www.rochesterastronomy.org/supernova.html
  • Anything in Orion (visible after midnight now)
  • Geosynchronous (GEO) satellites (where, when, optical variability)
  • Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites (wide field camera, untracked)
  • Near-Earth objects
  • Mercury transit on November 11 (with an exoplanet transit at night backup)
  • Other selected targets in either hemisphere, your choice

To continue this week and next as time allows

• AstroImageJ
  • Installation
  • Use with simple images
  • Photometry
  • Advanced concepts
  • Examples: Jupiter see https://www.astro.louisville.edu/shared_skies/archive/select/planets/jupiter/20140313/
  • Examples: TESS data and followup with ground-based observations

Week 7 (September 30)

• Continued discussion of research and optical astronomy data

Week 8 (October 7)

• Fall break

Week 9 (October 14)

• Final organization of research topics (revised 2019-10-21)
  • Natalie Warning - Geosynchronous satellites
  • Shawn Knabel, Dominic Smith, Travis Waters - TESS exoplanets
  • Michael Turner - TESS and expolanets
  • Christopher Anderson - Orion star formation
  • Benjamin Kantardzic- TESS and exoplanets
  • Dylan Scharff - Supernovae

• Exoplanet transit photometry of a TESS candidate
  • Full frame images
  • Candidates
  • Validation - night of October 13, 2019

Week 10 (October 21)

• Research by topic
  • TESS and exoplanets
    • Travis Waters, Shawn Knabel, Dominic Smith, Michael Turner, Ben Kantardzic
  • Supernovae
    • Dylan Scharff
  • Orion star formation
    • Chris Andersen
  • Geosynchronous satellites
    • Natalie Warning

• This week at Moore Observatory
  • Tuesday night likely clear
  • Wednesday night long range partly cloudy
  • Sunday night long range favorable

• Noise in signals
  • Gaussian random processes, photons, and Poisson noise
  • Assessing sources of systematic error and noise in photometry

Week 11 (October 28)

• Stellar spectra
• Radial velocities

Week 12 (November 4)

• Latest data on GEO satellites and TESS targets
  • See [1]
• Determining planetary mass from spectra
  • See Doppler Spectoscopy in Wikipedia

Week 13 (November 11)

• Transit of Mercury!!
  • Viewing in the planetarium garden area if it is clear
  • See Viewing guide

Week 14 (November 18)

• Use of AstroImageJ to analyze data
• Project data on our server at https://www.astro.louisville.edu/shared_skies/archive/astrolab/

If time available --

• High spatial resolution imaging
  • Lucky imaging
  • Adaptive optics
  • Role in exoplanet discovery
  • Interferometry present and future

Week 15 (November 25)

• Presentations of projects