Daily Schedule
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Week 1 — Celestial Coordinates and Telescope Mount — Polar Alignment — Easy Visual Targets
- Tuesday, March 15: The daily and annual motion of the stars — The RA/DEC Coordinate System — The Magnitude System — Some high points of these topics
- First Reading for Wednesday: The Losmandy G11 User Manual
- First Evening Meeting: Wednesday, March 16 at 9:30pm (moon phase almost full — very poor for seeing faint objects but good for working with equipment for the first time) — We will be getting hands-on experience with all the parts of the telescope mount you learned about in the G11 User Manual: the counterweight shaft, counterweights, and counterweight safety, the dovetail plate, and the saddle — Balancing the scope in RA — Balancing the scope in DEC — Polar alignment with the polar finder scope — Adjusting the altitude and azimuth of the mount — Adjusting RA and DEC setting circles with a bright star — Star Chart for March 16 — Easy and spectacular visual targets: Orion Nebula, Pleiades
Week 2 — Key Properties of Telescope Optics — Push-To Operation with Setting Circles — Visual Observation of Open Clusters and Double Stars
- First Assignment due Tuesday, March 22: Star Charting
- Tuesday, March 22 — Correct and Augment Charting Assignment — Degrees, arc-minutes, arc-seconds — Handy Sky Measures — Types of Telescopes and Telescope Math — Focal Length — Pinhole Camera Focal Length — Telescope Focal Length — The f/ ratio — Meade LX200 — Eyepiece Focal Length — Magnification — Apparent Field of View — Finally, two properties of eyepieces we didn’t have time to get to: Exit Pupil Diameter = focal length of eyepiece divided by f/ and (2) Exit Pupil vs. Eye Pupil (see Assignment 2)
- Evening Meeting: Wednesday (9:30-12:30) (dusk 7:33pm, moon phase 3rd quarter — great!) — Completed our work on using setting circles to find targets — Aligned on Sirius — Targetted the Beehive Cluster easily — Re-aligned on Sirius — Targetted Tegmine unsuccessfully (rats!) — Finder charts for Beehive and Tegmine
Week 3 — The Electromagnetic Spectrum, Diffraction and Interference — Go-To Operation with the Gemini-2 — Visual Observation of Galactic Targets
Week 4 — Theory for CMOS Image Calibration — Astrophotography of a Galactic Target
- Third Assignment due Tuesday, April 5: Understanding Resolution, Diffraction, and Interference
- Tuesday, April 5 — Resolution, Diffraction, and Interference in the JWST (we watched from 1m15s to 3m30s in this video only) — Types of variable stars and transients (Cepheids, Lyrae, Eclipsing Binaries, Exoplanets, Supernovae, M Dwarfs) — The conversion of photons to electrons and the conversion of electrons to ADUs in a CMOS sensor — The meaning of the slope and y intercept in the graph of ADU counts as a function of the number of electrons — How darks, biases, and flats are used to calibrate lights — Aperture-annulus photometry — Comp stars, target stars, and differential photometry — Fitting light curves and examining residuals
- Evening Meeting: Wednesday (dusk 7:47pm, moon phase waxing crescent, almost first quarter — ok to poor) — We chose NGC 4565 “The Needle Galaxy” in Coma Berenices as our first target and I processed it with PixInsight — PixInsight is not an app you will be learning to use in this course — You will have enough to do learning AstroImageJ — My PixInsight procedure — Resulting NGC 4565 Image (not bad for our first work of the term!)
Week 5 — Start Analysis of WASP-12b with AstroImageJ — Obtaining Eclipsing Binary Data
Week 6 — Finish Analysis of WASP-12b with AstroImageJ — Obtaining Exoplanet Transit Data
- Assignment 5 for Tuesday, April 19: Follow my AIJ step-by-step directions up to and including the section titled “Plate-Solving Using Astrometry.net”
- Tuesday, April 19 — Finish Analysis of Transient Targets Using AstroImageJ — Generate Seeing Profile — Apply Multi-Aperture Measurement Method — Plot Results
- Final Evening Meeting: Saturday (dusk 8:00pm, moon phase waning gibbous, almost third quarter — great!) — We will do an exoplanet transit of WASP-14b collecting lights will go from 10pm to 2am, after which we will do flats, darks, and biases — ETD Ephemeris and Finder Chart for WASP-14b
Week 7 — Finish Light-Curve Analyses of Data Taken in Weeks 5 and 6
