last updated 11/15/17
 

FIRST-PROJECT IMAGES!

NGC 7331 Adly Templeton, Connor Marti and Marcus Hughes

NGC 6946 Johnny Inoue, Brendan Rosseau and Ross Yu

NGC 6992 Declan Daly, Christian Lockwood and Cielo Perez

ASSIGNMENTS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

Assignments

Tutorial week 1 assignment: Light and Magnitudes
Tutorial week 2 assignment: Celestial Sphere
Tutorial week 3 assignment: Signals and Statistics
Tutorial week 4 assignment: CCDs
Tutorial week 5 assignment: Photometry
Tutorial week 6 assignment: Spectroscopy
Tutorial week 7 assignment: Telescopes and Optics
Tutorial week 8 assignment: Extinction and AO
Tutorial week 9 assignment: Non-optical Astronomy

Announcements

CCD lab is rescheduled to Monday, Oct. 23; the second observing project will be assigned at that time. First observing project presentations will be held during lab time on Monday, October 30.

CLASS LINKS AND APPLETS

Here is a selection of some useful links. Do not limit yourself to these – by now you know how to search for things on the web, and how to determine if a source is trustworthy (hint: sites ending in .edu are likely to be reliable). Also useful: Astronomy 111 links page.

CLASS RESOURCES
How to Write an Observing Proposal

Excellent reference websites for many aspects of this course!
Steve Majewski’s observing course page — clear explanations of error analysis, CCDs, photometry and more…
Case Western Reserve course; scroll down for topics

Online Resource Links
NASA ADS search page
NASA Skyview
CDS – the main entry point for the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre
Simbad Astronomical Database
VizieR Catalog Service
VizieR tutorial
NED Extragalactic Database
ESO Archive
Digitized Sky Survey
Variable Star Nomenclature
Los Alamos Preprints (astro-ph)
2MASS Image Gallery
MAST Archive Searcher
MAST Tutorial videos
Hubble Legacy Archive
IRAF tutorial

Observing, Spherical Trig, Time and the Sky
EXCELLENT page for general observing concepts READ THIS!
U. Nebraska’s GREAT applets
Finding Charts using Eric Jensen’s TAPIR
Airmass plots using Eric Jensen TAPIR
Celestial Coordinates
Horizon Coordinates
Sidereal Time, Right Ascension and Hour Angle
Seasons and the Zodiac
Paths of the Sun
Rotating Sky Explorer
Galactic Coordinate System
The Constellations and their Stars
Nick Strobel’s Naked-Eye Astronomy notes
A Compendium of Atmospheric Optics Effects
World Time Zones
Sidereal Time Applet
Solar vs. sidereal day
Star Trail video 
Williamstown in Google maps
Spherical triangle applet
Spherical trig sine and cosine formulae
Apparent nightly motion of a star
Precession demo
Sunrise, Sunset, Solar Noon and Position from Anywhere on Earth
Animation of Solar Motions and Analemma

Photometry Links
Magnitude/Filter Systems
More on Magnitude/Filter Systems
Photometry Concepts
ImageJ documentation
Interstellar Extinction information
AAVSO photometry pages
another page about ImageJ photometry
CCD Photometry (from AAVSO)
Photometry website
MaximDL photometry tutorial

CCD Links

Greg Bothun’s (irreverent) CCD page
Aliasing and Nyquist’s Theorem
Handout from U. Florida with good explanation of CCD processing
MOS capacitor
CCD architecture and readout
QE and Thinning
Clocking and charge transfer
Java Simulation of CCD fabrication
Description of noise sources in a CCD

Spectroscopy Links
Spectroscopy website
Classic prism spectrograph
Gratings and Prisms
Spectroscopy download from Indiana U: www.astro.indiana.edu/classweb/a540/notes/002_10Jan_ch03.ppt
The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph from Helen Merrett’s thesis (2006)
More on the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph
Integral Field Spectroscopy
Fraunhofer diffraction
The Grating Equation
Blazed gratings
Blaze Angle
Overlapping orders
Grating applet
Double-slit Interference (Young’s Experiment)
Single-Slit Diffraction

UNIX Resources
UC Berkeley
U. Washington

Light
The Doppler Effect
Polarization demo
Atmospheric Opacity (from JPL)
Electromagnetic Spectrum
Dispersion
Reflection, Refraction, Diffraction
Transverse and Longitudinal Waves
Superposition Principle
A Compendium of Atmospheric Optics Effects
Blackbodies
The Blackbody Game
Radiation Laws & Color Indices
Kirchhoff’s Laws

Stars
Star Colors
Magnitudes
Transverse Velocity Derivation
Proper Motion & More…
Parallax applet
Nearby Stars

Optics and Telescopes Links
Clair Max’s AO Website
AO Before and After ( Sky and Telescope)
Australia Telescope National Facility on AO
Wikipedia on AO
The Giant Magellan Telescope
The Thirty Meter Telescope
Plate scale calculation
Chandra X-Ray Telescope applets

Non-Optical Astronomy Links
Radio Fundamentals
Haystack tutorial
NRAO web page
ALMA Observatory website
SOFIA Telescope
X-ray astronomy
UV astronomy

Probability and Statistics Links
The Gaussian Distribution
Several good applets
Central Limit Theorem
Probability distribution applets
Pascal’s Triangle
More Pascal’s Triangle
Binomial applet
Poisson applet

The Hubble Heritage Project. This technicolor gallery
features some of the most glorious images taken with HST, meticulously processed to bring out details and colors.

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