ASTR469
Projects
Homework assignments
Lectures and lecture notes
Jan 11 2019: Magnitudes and Radiation Processes.
[slides] [lecture hand-out] (note: did not get to blackbodies, will do next lecture!)
Jan 14 2019: Blackbody Radiation and Stars as Blackbodies
Jan 23-25 2019: Coordinates (Jan 25 in Planetarium), guest lecture Loren Anderson.
[lecture hand-out covering both lectures]
Feb 8 2019: Optics and Telescope Front-end Basics II
[slides]
Problem-solving session questions and answers
Feb 11 2019: Photometry
[slides] [lecture hand-out]
Feb 27 2019: Gravitational Waves (Paul Baker guest lecture)
Link: LIGO Science summaries
Link: GW Open Science Center (formerly LIGO Open Science Center)
Link: NANOGrav 11yr GW Background Paper Science Summary
Link: "Astrobite" about 11yr CW paper from one of our Grad students!
Mar 1 2019: Midterm Review [see earlier in this page for equation sheet]
Mar 8 2019: Linux/Unix Basics
Useful links!
Coordinate conversion:
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Tools/convcoord/convcoord.pl
NASA Extragalactic Database (NED):
https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/
A great aggregator of information. It links to a lot of data and any papers that
reference objects in the sky.
Ned Wright's Cosmology Calculator:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html
Dr. Wright wrote this very useful tool to determine distance and other information
about objects at a given redshift, properly accounting for cosmological effects.
Large astronomical surveys and data archives:
SDSS:
http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr14/en/tools/quicklook/
SDSS is an ongoing, rigorous optical survey of much of the sky, providing images
and distance information for many galaxies (also contains optical spectrum and
image from the survey, and some derived information).
Radio surveys:
NVSS: https://www.cv.nrao.edu/nvss/
FIRST: http://sundog.stsci.edu/
VLASS: https://science.nrao.edu/science/surveys/vlass
These are big surveys of the (mostly northern) sky and will potentially contain
images and information about many sky positions. For the southern sky you can search
for the PMN survey. The VLASS is a current, ongoing survey whose pilot data is
so far available (as of early 2018).
NRAO archive:
https://archive.nrao.edu/archive/archiveimage.html
Image search (sometimes here you can find a nice radio image made with the Very
Large Array or VLBA or Green Bank):
Hubble telescope archive:
https://hla.stsci.edu/
Hubble Archive (click "Enter site here" link) - this looks for any data --- images
or spectra --- taken by Hubble space telescope!
Celestial Sphere animation:
http://astro.unl.edu/naap/motion2/animations/ce_hc.html
Demonstrates the positioning and movements of celestial coordinates, depending
on where on Earth you are standing.