ASTR 230 Assignments & Links

DUE DATES

USEFUL LINKS FOR THE ASSIGNMENTS

Set your watch to Universal Time or Central Time at the NIST website.
The Millennium Star Atlases in the reading room are a good place to locate setup stars for your targets.
Here's a good place to get finding charts for your objects for use with the CCD on campus. Choose the 'basic' interface, highlight 'Digitized Sky Survey', pick a size of 1 degree, and download the FITS file. Then load it into IRAF, smooth it using 'gauss' with sigma=1. Display the smoothed image with zsc- and zra+, make the stars black in the ximtool, and then use 'wcslab' to add a coordinate grid. Scale the image to highlight only the bright stars, with the intermediate ones still visible but looking faint and the background a very light grey. Then print out the chart and mark your object on it in black ink or with a pencil.
Look up coordinates, magnitudes, etc for known objects here.
My favorite search engine for astronomical literature allows you to find references to professional papers.
A list of the NGC/IC catalog may prove useful to you for selecting objects for your project.
Latitude and Longitude for the campus are: 29:43:09.6, 95:24:15.6, respectively.
Latitude and Longitude for George Observatory are: 29:22:30, 95:35:37.
Latitude and Longitude for Manvel location is: 29:27:56, 95:20:17.7.
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