This is a listing of books and apps that are relevant for this course. I will be compiling and distributing handouts so you don’t have to aquire any of them.
For an elementary introduction to the things we will be covering in the first two weeks, pp. 1-22 of the Edmund Sky Guide. It is out-of-print and hard to get.
A nice book that is also out-of-print but is actually available inexpensively is Neale Howard’s The Telescope Handbook and Star Atlas. However, it is probably a larger and heavier book than you want to have on your shelf for the rest of your life.
Turn Left at Orion by Guy Consolmagno is very popular. For visual observing with a telescope, it is probably the one best choice. When I picked the Beehive cluster and Tegmine (Zeta Cancri) as our second night’s targets, I used Turn Left at Orion. When I picked prominent galaxies in Leo and Virgo for our third night’s targets, I again used this book.
The only good textbook I am aware of for the scientific work we want to get to is Brian D. Warner, A Practical Guide to Lightcurve Photometry and Analysis, 2nd Edition, 2016.
Exoplanet Observing for Amateurs by Bruce L. Gary is great but a little too specialized. The author has made it available for free after the publisher went out of business.
A Practical Guide to Exoplanet Observing by Dennis Conti covers much the same material with a focus on AstroImageJ for data processing. Despite the fact that it doesn’t disentangle the theory of what is going on from the specifics of AstroImageJ as clearly as I would like, overall it is the best choice for learning differential photometry. Also, I have used Dennis’s materials three times when teaching other AAVSO astronomers differential photometry, and so I know that it can be a super-effective jump-start straight into the current methods used for variable star observation.
I will spend most of a class explaining the theory behind astronomical image processing. Then in the following two classes we will use AstroImageJ to process Dennis’s 336-image dataset for Wasp-12b.
Most of the introductory books contain star charts. The best starter for a book of charts for someone working at a telescope and doing visual observing is the oxymoronically-titled Pocket Sky Atlas, Jumbo Edition. The paperback-sized “pocket” edition was very popular despite being awfully small for field use at night, so they came out with the “jumbo pocket” edition. Someone with more money and space might want to try to acquire a copy of the out-of-print Sky Atlas 2000.0, Deluxe Laminated Edition.
However, only purists use paper charts nowadays. Replacing them is a proliferation of apps that compute the positions of the stars anytime and anywhere.
A really nice, inexpensive, and simple app is Sky Guide. It is the one I use when I don’t want to worry about any settings. I just turn it on and point. There is a free version for iOS. Some features are in-app purchases. Unfortunately Sky Guide is not available on other platforms. There is an app by the same name on Android. It is made by some other company and gets lousy reviews.
SkySafari 7 Plus is a nice choice for planning observations, especially if you have an iPad to run it on. I make a lot of use of Sky Safari 6 Pro which I run on a Mac laptop. SkySafari is capable of running the Gemini computer on the College’s Losmandy mount. In the long-run that is what we want to have set up.
For this course, I have TheSkyX installed on my Mac laptop. You will get to see how that is used for computer control of the telescope. TheSkyX is capable of controlling all the other parts of the system (camera, filter wheel, auto-guider, and focuser), which is what makes it ideal for the differential photometry work we will be doing by the last few weeks of the course. It is too complex and expensive to have each of you install and use it. Once TheSkyX has acquired the images, we will transfer them to your computers for analysis.