Some useful links:
-
The McKee-Taylor report, a decadal review of astronomy, with
recommendations for where astronomy should be going in the next 10
years. (Or you can go straight to the executive summary.)
- Adaptive Optics links:
- A very basic overview of the idea of AO.
- The course web page for a
class at UC Santa Cruz
on adaptive optics. Browse through the slides
from the first lecture to get a tour of basic
adaptive optics concepts and facilities.
- A introductory
review article from Science magazine (vol. 262, p. 1345).
This is a good place to go to start getting a bit more than just the
basic concept.
- A
movie showing a star imaged with AO on and with AO off.
- A very basic overview of the idea of AO.
- The Chandra Observatory Proposer's Guide.
- The Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) on the SWIFT mission.
- The XRS-2 microcalorimeter on the Suzaku mission. See also this link.
- An overview of the ROSAT mission.
- Here's an explanation of integral field spectroscopy.
- A newsletter article on a particular integral field unit.
- A list of review topics and practice problems.
- The midterm exam from last time I taught the course.
- CCD links:
- A nice web page tutorial on CCDs by Christy Tremonti at Johns Hopkins, including an animation of CCD readout scheme.
- Technical overview/tutorial on CCDs from a manufacturer, SITe.
- "CCD University", a collection of pages explaining various CCD concepts, from a manufacturer of CCDs, Apogee.
- Detector information from Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO), to give you an idea of the specs of CCDs you might find at a (small) modern research observatory.
- CCD images showing cosmic ray hits. The first shows the whole chip, and the second is a zoom to a region about 150x180 pixels.
The bright strips are the spectrum of a star, and the dark bands across the spectra are absorption bands from molecules in Earth's atmosphere.
All the other bright spots are cosmic ray hits. This is from a 30-minute exposure at CTIO.
The expected cosmic ray rate is 100 per minute at CTIO for a 2048x2048 chip.
That would predict about 20 hits in the zoomed image below, which
is about right. (You can count them, compare to the expected mean, and do the Poisson probability yourself!)
- Compare Poisson and Gaussian distributions.
- The Statistical Consulting Center for Astronomy at Penn State.
- Hyper-Stat Online at Rice, which has text and demos, including an explanation of the Central Limit Theorem
- Some on-line demos of the Central Limit Theorem:
- A Java demo, simulating dice rolls.
- Another Java demo, which lets you choose your own input distribution. Try choosing a very skewed distribution, and see if the distribution of sample means still comes out Gaussian. You may also want to check the "Fit normal" box to superimpose a Gaussian fit on the distribution, to see how well it does or doesn't match a Gaussian.
- A paper by Wegman et al. on "Statistical Software, Siftware, and Astronomy"; covers available statistics packages.
- Numerical Recipes.
- Anscombe's Quartet and Robust Fitting.