Course Information

• Intended Audience. This course is designed to teach practical astronomical laboratory techniques to upper level Astronomy majors and others in closely related fields. It is a hands-on course with a minimum of derivations and formal theory (I will assume you get a full dose of that in most other courses).
• Emphasis. We will cover optical and radio astronomical observational techniques in roughly equal proportions.
• Textbook. Unfortunately, there is no suitable textbook for the course, at least that I am aware of. I will be handing out lecture notes every week and will occasionally assign readings in textbooks on reserve in the Physics library or on the Web. Students should read the assigned readings prior to attending the lecture. This is definitely the best way to understand and even enjoy the course.
• Schedule. Each week I will give a lecture on Tuesday and supervise a laboratory section on Thursday. The lecture may last the entire 75 minutes or I may only lecture part of the time and start the lab early. I want to emphasize the hands-on aspect of the course, so I will keep the lecturing to the minimum required to understand the technques and goals of the current lab.
• Room. The lectures and labs will normally be in room 655 VAN, but this is subject to change. we will occasionally use the optics lab room (556) and the radio astronomy instrumentation (606) and observation rooms (666A).
• Equipment. Some equipment used in this course is expensive, i.e. we only have one of each (e.g. a spectrum analyzer). We will have to find ways to share the equipment, perhaps by having two lab section times. We will discuss this at the beginning of the semester.
• Math Prerequisite. The student is expected to have taken or be enrolled in first year calculus. I will introduce mathematical concepts as needed, but I will assume some exposure in a math class.
• Computer Literacy. I will assume that all students have some familiarity with computers, especially data analysis and plotting programs. The Department officially supports the programs MathCAD, Excel, Maple, Mathematica, Graphical Analysis, and Axum for this purpose. At a minimum, you should know how do plot columns of (x,y) data, calculate means and variances, and to fit simple functions (e.g. linear and polynomial least-squares functions). We will discuss more advanced topics such as chi-squared goodness-of-fit criteria and uncertainties in derived quantities in the first lecture and lab.
• Lab Notebook. All students are required to keep a lab notebook which includes notes on observations, sketches of experimental setups, copies of plots and data taken, and preliminary data reduction.
• Homework. There will be no homework, but written lab reports are required one week after every lab assignment. The lab reports must include figures and plots as well as a discussion of the experiment and significance of the results.
• Exams. There are no exams in this course.
• Course Grade. The course grade will be determined by four criteria:

1. Competence in the laboratory.
2. Grades on written lab reports.
3. Completeness and quality of lab notebook.
4. Formal research presentation at the end of the semester.

These will count about equally.