ASTR 230 Assignments & Links
DUE DATES
- Feb 24: Lab I
- Mar 24: Lab II + Short Project
- Mar 31: Oral exam on lecture material
- Apr 28: Special Project Oral Report
- Apr 29: Special Project Web Page
USEFUL LINKS FOR THE ASSIGNMENTS
- Set your watch to Universal Time or Central Time at the
NIST website.
- The Millennium Star Atlases in the reading room are a good place to locate
setup stars for your targets.
-
Here's a good place to get
finding charts for your objects for use with CCD imaging projects.
Choose the 'SkyView Query Form' interface, and under Optical highlight 'Digitized
Sky Survey (DSS)', input your coordinates, under `Common Options'
pick a size of 1 degree, and download the FITS file. Then load it into IRAF,
smooth it using 'gauss' with sigma=1. Display the smoothed image with zsc- and zra+ or
some other appropriate value of z1 and z2, make
the stars black in ds9, and then use 'wcslab' to add a coordinate grid.
Scale the image to highlight only the bright stars, with the intermediate ones still visible
but looking faint and the background a very light grey. xv will be helpful for grabbing
the image and changing it to greyscale and storing it. Then print out the chart and
mark your object on it in black ink or with a pencil.
An example of what it should look like is here.
- Look up coordinates, magnitudes,
etc for known objects here.
- My favorite
search engine for astronomical literature allows you to find references to
professional papers.
-
A list of the NGC/IC catalog
may prove useful to you for selecting objects for your project.
- Latitude and Longitude for the campus are: 29:43:09.6, 95:24:15.6, respectively.
- Latitude and Longitude for George Observatory are: 29:22:30, 95:35:37.
- Latitude and Longitude for Manvel location is: 29:27:56, 95:20:17.7.
- Need Unix help?