Time and place:

Tuesdays at 4 in Munroe Fox Lecture Theatre (MFLT),

Wednesdays 11 to 1 in McCrea 201.

The observatory schedule.

Books: The most important books for this course are:

• H. Karttunen et al., Fundamental Astronomy, 3rd Ed., Springer, 2000.
• M Zeilik & S A Gregory, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 4th Ed., Saunders, 1998.

• B.W. Carrol and D.A. Ostlie, An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, Addison-Wesley, 1996.

• Robert C. Smith, Observational Astrophysics, CUP, 1995,

• A.E. Roy and D. Clarke, "Astronomy: Principles and Pracitce", 4th edition, IoP, 2003.

Lecture notes: Some lecture notes and other handouts will be distributed in class or posted here; watch this space.

The Dome: Some of the practical assignments will involve use of the Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. Before working in the dome, all students should be familiar with the RHUL Observatory User's Guide.

Data: I have copied several of the data sets taken earlier to the directory here. The individual data folders are zipped. Download the data sets you need and then to unzip them, right-click, Extract All, etc. To get the dates and times of the individual images you can look in the FITS file headers. This can be viwed with the program fv (installed on the teaching lab PCs). Click on "Header" to show the header. See below for more information on analyzing the data with ImageJ.

Picture of the week:

Problem sheets: Problem sheets are a vital part of this course and will form 10% of the course mark. They should be handed in by the announced time and date and can be turned in either in my pigeon hole or in my office, W262. Late submissions will be corrected, but no marks will normally be credited unless the delay is agreed with GDC before the deadline. If you are away ill, you should see me on your return.

Problem sheets now on Moodle!

Practical Reports: Practical reports will form 20% of the course mark and will be due in the weeks between those where you have problem sheets. Some of the reports will involve 'complex problems', where you are intended to do a certain amount of research in the library or internet. Others will involve practical assignments using the telescope in the RHUL observatory or data from professional telescopes. A typical report would involve at least three pages of text not counting related figures, images, graphs, etc. For the practical assignments you are encouraged to work in groups, but the writing up of the reports must be done individually.

As with the problem sheets, the practical reports should be handed in by the announced time and date and turned in either in my pigeon hole or office. Because of the unpredictable observing conditions, there will have to be some flexibility for reports involving telescope work. If the weather refuses to cooperate we will substitute related practical exercises using existing data.

If for any reason you have special difficulties or needs related to telescope work, please discuss this with me.

How to write an ImageJ plugin: ImageJ allows the user to write his or her own routines called "plugins" to analyze and manipulate images. There is a large collection of plugins on the ImageJ plugin page. There is information on how to write plugins as part of the ImageJ documentation and and there is a tutorial by Werner Bailer on how to write ImageJ plugins.

To get started using plugins with ImageJ, you need to run it from your own area, which you can do by copying the file myImageJ.bat to somewhere on your Y drive. In the same folder where you put myImageJ.bat you should make a folder called plugins. When you double click myImageJ.bat it will run ImageJ and automatically include all of the plugins you have put in your plugins folder. As a start try downloading a few of the plugins from the ImageJ plugin page or try Star_Finder.java plugin, which you can extend to find stars. If you download only the java file, you first need to compile it using the "compile and run" command from the plugins menu in ImageJ (if you also download the class file then this step is already done).

ImageJ Photometry: I have written two plugins to do the photometry exercise in a highly automated way. You can either use the plugins as they stand or you can copy the java code to your area and customize it for your purposes. The code is still in a state of flux and can be found in the plugins folder here. To use, copy everything in this directory including the contents of the plugins folder to your area. For convenience here is a zipped version of the plugins folder, plugins.zip, which contains the .class files as well as the source code. Read the file here for further details.

Some interesting links: