Observational Techniques Home Page

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Observational Techniques Home Page 2008

Timetable

The course will start on Tuesday 29th April 2008 and end on Friday 6th June 2008. "Lectures" will be held on Tuesdays 2-3pm and Fridays on Fridays, 9.30-10.30 and 11.00 - 12.00. Lectures will be held in the CSO tea-room.

Lecturer

Paul Francis will be the main lecturer. There will also be a number of guest lecturers.

Course Structure

This will not be a conventional lecture course: it is intended to be far more hands-on and practical. Notes will be posted ahead of each lecture and everyone will be expected to have read and digested them ahead of each lecture. There will be a short multiple choice quiz at the start of each pair of lectures to make sure that you do this reading! This will free-up the lecture time to be spent on doing practical exercises, in a tutorial style.

Notes

Reading for 1st lecture Units and Coordinates
Computer Programming
Exercises used in lectures on 13th April
Statistics Notes: Part 1
Telescopes Notes
Radio Astronomy Notes: Part 1, Part 1
Statistics Notes: Part 2
UV/Optical/IR Astronomy Notes
Spectroscopy notes

Assignments

Frank's radio astronomy assignment

Syllabus

Topics will not be covered in precisely this order. In particular, the programming and stats sections will be broken up in pieces and scattered throughout the course. You will have plenty of opportunities to apply these techniques to assignments in the other sections of the course.

Computer programming. Will use the Python language
- Hardware
- Basics: loops, input and output, variables, conditional statements
- Plotting: matplotlib package.
- Interacting with data in FITS format: data analysis.
Units and Coordinates.
- Celestial coordinates
- Siderial time and observability
- Magnitudes, absolute magnitudes and photometry
- F-lambda and F-nu, Janskies etc.
- Orbital elements.
Telescope Basics.
- Ray tracing approach. Abberations, fields of view, correctors, telescope designs, focal stations. Pupil, plate-scale, f-ratios.
- Wave optics approach. Diffraction limit. Interferometry.
Optical and IR astronomy.
- CCDs. Quantum efficiency. Read noise, dark current. Bias, overscan, cosmic rays, non-linearity, saturation. Nod-and-shuffle. Read-out times.
- Imaging - sources of noise. Signal to noise ratio calculation. Interference and glass filters. Photometry, reddening. Sky background and its variation.
- Spectroscopy. Longslit, IFU, tunable filter, slit mask, fibres. Gratings, echelles, VPH. Signal-to-noise calculations.
- Astrometry
- Seeing and adaptive optics.
- Infrared. Different detectors. Sky. Shift and add. Sky subtraction and its pitfalls. Nodding secondaries.
Radio astronomy. Guest lectures most likely.
Statistics and Uncertainties.
- Probability distribution functions: binomial, Poisson and Gaussian.
- Error propagation, sqrt(n), optimal (inverse variance) weighting.
- Significance. What it means and how to test it. Detection limits, false positives, how large does a sample need to be.
- Chi-squared and regression.
- Monte-carlo methods.
- Non-normal errors. Non-parametric statistics. Mean, median and mode. KS and RS tests.
- Systematic errors: Malmquist and amplification biasses.
Writing telescope proposals.
Designing and building telescopes and instruments: guest lecture?.
- What goes wrong with big projects: project management.
- CDR, CoDR, SV - the stages (and acronyms) a project goes through.
How to pick a good topic to research: panel discussion with several guests.