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.

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

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
• Exoplanet transit photometry of a TESS candidate

Week 10 (October 21)

• Stellar spectra
• Radial velocities