TRS Useful Links

Here is a collection of potentially useful links throughout the wiki (with occasional references to YouTube videos) that may or may not be helpful for your summer work.

Downloading the data

• How do I download data from Spitzer? has a wide variety of flavors of tutorials. The second formal chapter of the professional astronomer's Data Reduction Cookbook ultimately comes from Luisa's last year's NITARP project.
• SHA

Mosaics

• What is a mosaic and why should I care?
• Resolution
• Why does it matter to know what is an artifact and what is not? So you don't get fooled by stuff like this.

Getting data from other wavelengths

• How can I get data from other wavelengths to compare with infrared data from Spitzer?
• How can I make a color composite image using Spitzer and/or other data?
• Resolution
• Also: Access the WISE archive directly here, and see a step-by-step WISE archive tutorial from Berkeley here.

Literature work

• How can I find out what scientists already know about a particular astronomy topic or object?
• I'm ready to go on to the "Advanced" Literature Searching section
• YouTube video on how to take antiquated coordinates from a literature papers and use 2MASS to get updated current, correct coordinates for each object. May only work well for YSOs (the BRC project).

Doing photometry

OK, this step is doing to take the longest, be the most complex, involve the most steps and the most math.

Never just trust that the computer has done it right. It probably did what you asked it to do correctly, but you asked it to do the wrong thing. Always make some plots to test and see if the photometry seems correct.

• Units
• Photometry
• I'm ready to go on to a more advanced discussion of photometry
• Aperture photometry using APT, specifically this, which is the closest thing to a cookbook we will give you.
• YouTube video on using APT, including calculating the number APT needs. (15 min because it starts from software installation and goes through doing photometry.)
• Resolution

Working with (text) data tables

• YouTube video on what tbl files are, how to access them, and specifically how to import tbl files into xls. (10min) Also works for any plain text file.
• Units
• Central wavelengths and zero points.
• Color-Magnitude and Color-Color plots

Making SEDs

WARNING: lots of math and programming spreadsheets here too.. you WILL do this more than once to get the units right!

• Units
• SED plots