Observational Astronomy (308)
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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
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
- TESS and exoplanets
- 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
- High spatial resolution imaging
- Lucky imaging
- Adaptive optics
- Role in exoplanet discovery
- Interferometry present and future