ASTR337-Fall2017

This repo contains course materials for the Fall 2017 ASTR 337 (“Observational Techniques“) course at Amherst College. Please contact Kate Follette at [email protected] or Kim Ward-Duong ([email protected]) with any questions.

These materials may be reproduced for educational purposes only.

Contents of the Labs are as follows (also in labcontents.txt in Lab folder):

Lab 1 - Intro and Plotting Basics

1. Jupyter introduction
2. Reading in tabular data with pandas
3. Working with pandas series
4. Making scatterplots
5. Discussion of the HR diagram

Lab 2 - Astronomical Data and Functions

1. Working with data from VizieR
2. Python functions and pandas dataframes
3. More on scatterplots
4. Discussion of color-magnitude diagrams

Lab 3 - Observation Planning

1. Using iObserve
2. Working with the Simbad database
3. Writing an observing proposal

Lab 4 - Reading and Displaying FITS files

1. Reading in .fits with the astropy package
2. Displaying images with imshow
3. Working with images in DS9

Lab 5 - (Observing Night at Smith)

Lab 6 - Working with FITS Image Data

1. Sorting data based on header information
2. Creating N-dimensional image arrays
3. Arithmetic operations on arrays
4. Bias frames, darks, and flatfielding

Lab 7 - Image Registration and RGB Image Creation

(to be added)

Lab 8 - Image Analysis and Padding

1. Using imexam in pyraf to analyze images
2. Padding numpy arrays
3. Shifting numpy arrays

Lab 9 - (Observing Night at Smith)

1. Interactive photometry exercise