Research Techniques in Observational Astronomy (AST 598 VI)

Course information Guidelines for the data reduction and analysis project. Current lecture schedule.  The syllabus.  The textbook.  Solutions to exam review questions.
	The current moon phase, courtesy of U.S.N.O.

Web resources

• Skyview: Images of the sky at a large variety of wavelengths.
• Simbad: Extensive bibliographic database.
• NED (NASA Extragalactic database): Bibliographic information, data, and images of extragalactic objects, as well as a nice coordinate calculator.
• Vizier: On-line searching of thousands of astronomical catalogs.
• ADS Abstract Service: Access to full articles from most major astronomical journals.

Statistics

• 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
• Statistics lectures online at Loyola, including examples of the Central Limit Theorem.
• A paper by Wegman et al. on "Statistical Software, Siftware, and Astronomy"; covers available statistics packages.
• Numerical Recipes.
• Doubts about Numerical Recipes.
• Anscombe's Quartet and Robust Fitting.

CCDs

• Animation of CCD readout scheme from a nice web page tutorial on CCDs by Christy Tremonti at Johns Hopkins.
• Technical overview/tutorial on CCDs from a manufacturer, SITe.
• Detector information from Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO).

Books on reserve at Noble Science Library

Statistics and Data Presentation

• Babu and Feigelson, Astrostatistics.
• Babu and Feigelson, Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy II.
• Bevington and Robinson, Data reduction and error analysis for the physical sciences.
• Feigelson and Babu, Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy.
• Taylor, An Introduction to Error Analysis.
• Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Observational Astronomy

• Birney, Observational Astronomy.
• Kitchin, Astrophysical Techniques.

Drop me an e-mail if you have questions.

Comments or suggestions to Eric Jensen,

Last modified: Thu Feb 5 15:45:36 1998 ;