1st Project Meeting - September 19, 2009
- Overview of observational astronomy
- All those pretty pictures online are created by stacking images that were taken at different wavelengths through different filters using a CCD camera
- Check out this news article to read more about how they make spectacular pictures
- Overview of our project
- Using the 61" Kuiper Telescope of Cassegrain design we observed transiting extrasolar planets TrES-3b and TrES-4b and galaxy cluster NGC 7318 using the Mont4K CCD imager
- Our goal is to create light curves of the extrasolar planet transits so that we can deduce many important features of our extrasolar planet systems
- The first step in our project will be to create a pretty picture of NGC 7318 by using IRAF to reduce noise in our images by eliminating bias and applying a flat-field correction
- We will then stack the images of different wavelengths and "manipulate" the colors to create a good image
- Once everyone is used to the IRAF environment, we will all be working on different chunks of the data to create light curves based on special IRAF techniques for light curves developed by Dr. Betsy Green for observing pulsating binary star systems
- The light curves can be used to extract important data about our extrasolar planets which we will later turn into either a presentation or perhaps a scientific paper
- Homework
- Read through all of the links in this post, they will provide a good basis for our project
- Figure out what "biases" and "flats" are, and why we need them to get rid of noise in our images
- Pick up a fairly recent astronomy text and read the extrasolar planet section
- For more information about observational astronomy, and a more mathematically detailed description of certain topics, please refer to Dr. Laird Close's lecture notes from the Astronomy 302 course curriculum
