Coherent ideas of what to do with these pieces
Think of these as "Lego kits" to build .. you may need to go seek out the appropriate "Lego bricks" from the rest of the wiki (listed on each page) to supplement your skills in order to build these Lego kits.
Simpler
Literature: Observation and Inference
Resolution Skills includes links to resolution worksheets by Dr. Luisa Rebull (see Measuring resolutions and the Resolution worksheets linked near the bottom of the Resolution Skills page). The most recent worksheets include some of the more general information on resolution, as well as sources specific to regions we were studying in those years. Similar worksheets could be developed for any given region.
Measuring distances on images - includes link to activity Finding the velocity of a high-proper-motion star in IC2118
Getting your feet wet with images at IRSA - getting started playing with images
Making 3-color images with IRSA tools (mostly) - includes links to online lab on making 3-color images.
Dustier, Messier Messier Marathon - explore what different kinds of objects look like in the visible as compared to the IR.
Gliese Catalog Explorations - things to do with nearby stars
Getting your feet wet with catalogs and plots at IRSA - getting started playing with catalogs (tables) and plots
Playing Around with Clusters - more advanced
File:Lab Activity- IRSA Finder Chart.pdf - Lab from NITARP Alumnus Danny Mattern. Uses Finder Chart to explore images of bright stars, with explorations into resolution/pixel sizes, space-based observatories. Also see File:Optical Images and Stellar Spectra Lab Activity.pdf which explores those bright stars in different ways (also by Danny Mattern).
things that need to be copied, updated, generated ab initio, etc.
- 3-color image where your own image is one of hte planes (astrometry.net if need be)
- get list of cluster members. pull Gaia and 2mass and wise. make CMDs. get relative ages and disk fractions.
- Making CMDs/color-color diagrams and color selection - Taurus catalog has a catalog of legitimate young stars. Use this catalog to devise your own color selection approach to find young stars. Where do these objects fall with respect to either the Gutermuth or Koenig colors? Which ones would be retrieved or lost by these color selections? Would your method work if your catalog had a mixture of young stars and field stars?
- find rotation periods for set of K2 LCs - throw in periodic/not, noisy/not, sinusoidal/not, single/multi period, EBs
- take an apparent visual binary and use Finder Chart and Gaia to determine if the two are co-moving or not. If they are co-moving, use POSS, 2MASS, Gaia, even PanSTARRS to determine orbit. Don't forget to do a literature search to see if there is more information out there on the stars.
- "I need a sinusoidal light curve to play with"
Harder
- Images and Photometry with Image J by Wendy Curtis, NITARP alum
- Distance to Cepheid in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) by Wendy Curtis, NITARP alum
- Photometry of a Star Cluster -- Making an HR Diagram by Wendy Curtis, NITARP alum
- IC2118 project
- CG4 project
- Li-rich giants project - extending to new samples, e.g., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1139-7?utm_source=natastron_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=toc_41550_4_11&utm_content=20201107&WT.ec_id=NATASTRON-202011&sap-outbound-id=8AD016DDFB5DD0066576339CC17DD068DCD50FEF
- lab on Abell 2065 using SDSS - can we adapt to use IRSA tools?
- SDSS BOSS Plates Hubble's Law - can we adapt?
People want *anything* having to do with black holes. AGN light curves?
bookmarked from before
wise lesson plans?
SOFIA lesson plans?
Kepler lesson plans?
oh, god, all the "working with" pages from all my summer teams up to a few years ago.
Misc. Lesson Plans, Activities, and Useful Websites Please feel free to contribute. We do ask that you include your wiki signature (click on the username/date stamp button in the edit window) when submitting lesson plans and activities. This will help users of the site in the event they have questions. Also, when posting a website, please provide a brief description of the site along with the web link.
Future Research Project Ideas Here is a place to explore future research project ideas.
Now what? So you've finished your year of NITARP and are looking for what's next...
Vandana's brainstormed list
xx just sent me this page, which should have a syllabus: https://sites.google.com/a/siena.edu/observational-astronomy/
Some ideas:
- She has a lab about CCDs. Might be interesting to show how IR data collection is different.
- How do observing strategies in the IR differ from observing strategies in the optical?
- Optical measurements of SFRs can miss a lot of the action.
- The resolution in the IR is different than the optical. What should the resolution of Spitzer be? Go get the images. Measure the PSF. Did you get what you expected? (this one met by above materials)
- How does a galaxy's morphology depend on resolution?
I wonder if JWST already has tutorials like these? I'm focusing on galaxies because I'm assuming the NITARP ones focus more on stars? I need to look! In general, she's not that interested in teaching her students HOW TO GET DATA. That part should be incidental to the topics above, which she said would be the kind of thing she wants them to learn. Her link also includes a link to courses at other schools: https://sites.google.com/a/siena.edu/observational-astronomy/lab-resources/courses-at-other-schools
- Showing that stars are blackbodies? Except when they're not!
- Something about coordinate systems?
- Making color images that actually tell you the colors of stars?
- Comparing constellations with actual astronomical images?
- Planning an observing run, making a finder chart.
This professor actually teaches the Aladin interface explicitly: https://web.njit.edu/~gary/322/
- Something about proper motions? https://web.njit.edu/~gary/322/assets/Lab_3.pdf
- Looking at ZTF light curves, https://web.njit.edu/~gary/322/assets/Lab_4.pdf
- Measuring the transit of an exoplanet https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/ugrad/344/Lab5.pdf
- Fundamentals of IR spectroscopy