Observational Astrophysics
The Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, CAMK for the acronym in Polish, is the leading Institute of the GeoPlanet Doctoral School. The school is formed by seven institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Center for Theoretical Physics, Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Institute of Geological Sciences, Institute of Geophysics, Institute of Oceanology, Space Research Centre, and CAMK.
The school offers PhD programs in the disciplines of astronomy, physics, and Earth and environmental sciences.
For the Autumn/Winter 2021/2022 Semester, I offered a course on Observational Astrophysics for the PhD students of the doctoral school. Below, I make available my course notes and slides of my lectures. Most of the notes present only summaries of the main concepts, and make reference to additional reading material for more detailed discussions. I also tried to add hyperlinks to every document that I cite in the notes, for those that want to dig deeper into a given topic.
Slides:
- 01: Slides of lecture 01 (Introduction to the lectures, Paranal, and SALT);
- 02: Slides of lecture 02 (Astronomical mesurements, Earth's atmosphere);
- 03: Slides of lecture 03 (Optical telescope, active and adaptive optics);
- 04: Slides of lecture 04 (Photometry);
- 05: Slides of lecture 05 (Spectroscopy);
- 06: Slides of lecture 06 (Infrared astronomy);
- 07: Slides of lecture 07 (ESO Proposals);
- 08: Slides of lecture 08 (CCDs, Signal-to-noise ratio, and data reduction);
- 09: Slides of lecture 09 (Future large facilities);
- 10: Slides of lecture 10 (Polarimetry and Interferometry);
- 11: Slides of lecture 11 (Astrometry and Asteroseismology);
Lecture notes:
- 00: Course syllabus;
- 01: Astronomical measurements;
- 02: Electromagnetic radiation;
- 03: Earth's atmosphere;
- 04: Introduction to geometrical optics;
- 05: Introduction to telescopes;
- 06: Active and adaptive optics;
- 07: Topics for the first seminar;
- 08: Magnitude systems;
- 09: Photometry;
- 10: Spectroscopy;
- 11: Spectrophotometry;
- 12: Infrared astronomy;
- 13: Topics for the second seminar;
- 14: Astronomical coordinates;
- 15: Time;
- 16: Observing proposals;
- 17: Practical exercise: preparation and evaluation of proposals;
- 18: Optical detectors;
- 19: Data Processing;
- 20: Topics for the third seminar;
- 21: Astronomical Polarimetry;
- 22: Data reduction exercise;
- 23: Optical interferometry;
- 24: Astrometry;
- 25: Asteroseismology;
If you find typos, errors, bad English, broken links, or have any other feedback, let me know.