Astrometry And Orbital Elements
Lab 3:
Starts October 7
Due October 28, 2008
Lab 4:
Starts October 28
Due November 18
Lab 3 Instructions
Lab 4 Instructions
Equipment:
Super-LOTIS 24-inch Robotic Telescope, Kitt Peak, Arizona.
Super-LOTIS Website
From their website:
"Super-LOTIS (Livermore Optical Transient Imaging System) is a robotic telescope dedicated to the search for optical counterparts of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). The telescope is housed in a roll-off-roof facility at the Steward Observatory Kitt Peak site near Tucson, Arizona. The experiment is a collaboration between Steward Observatory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA GSFC, Clemson University, and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. In addition to observing GRBs, Super-LOTIS performs nightly observations of science targets in a queue mode."
Telescope Data:
The unpacked data files are in /home/kitt_peak
on your Linux computers. There you can find the packed Tar files as well as unpacked directories of the data.
Data Logs for each night of observing.
Some more info:
A tutorial on Astronomical Coordinates by James Graham - astroncoords.pdf
Starlight to Photoelectrons handout by James Graham - star-light-to-pe.pdf
Centroid Error Propogation handout by James Graham - centroid-error.pdf
Ephemeris Data for Asteroids - JPL Horizons
A tutorial on JPL Horizons Ephemeris by Karin Sandstrom - jpltutorial.pdf
How to request observations of your asteroid, by James Graham - New Images PDF
Data Analysis:
Nonlinear Least Squares Fit Presentation, by Karin Sandstrom - mpfit_intro.pdf
Files which demonstrate Gaussian fitting:
mygaussian.pro - a function to use with mpfit
fakedata.sav - has some data on which to test the fitting
testgaussfit.pro - which has code to fun mpfit to fit a gaussian to the data.
Files which demonstrate fitting with one independent variable and two dependent variables:
makecircdata.pro is a file to generate x and y points on a circle
mycirc.pro - which contains the function to use with mpfit
testcircfit.pro - which runs mpfit to fit a circle to the data.
Who Uses Astrometry?
Space Interferometry Mission launch: who knows?. J. Sincher worked on this mission at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If it is ever launched, it will create the highest precision map of the sky ever made. Accuracy will be measured at the micro-arcsecond level, in contrast to the 0.05 arcsecond error level you'll see in this lab. It will do this with an orbital interferometer.
