Edward Brown edited integration-lecture-lab.tex  about 9 years ago

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In previous editions of AST~208, the lecture and lab operated more or less independently. The revisions to the lab (\S~\ref{sec:lab}), especially the use of ``real'' data and analysis tools, now demand a more rigorous treatment of statistics and a tighter integration of the course lectures with the lab activities. To do this, the lectures in the first half of the course now cover foundational topics in astronomy---coordinates, sidereal time, flux, parallax, and diffraction---and statistics \citep[at the level of, e.g.,][]{Taylor1997An-Introduction}. As motivation, we introduce these concepts in the context of detecting exoplanets; this ties the introductory material to the treatment of planetary science in the latter half of the course.  In coordination with the lectures, the first two labs use \href{http://www.stellarium.org/}{Stellarium planetarium software} and \href{http://www.pa.msu.edu/abrams/}{Abrams Planetarium} to help the students become familiar with angular coordinates. The lecture on the wave nature of light is followed by a lab in which students use the \href{http://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html}{ds9 \href{http://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html}{DS9  visualization software} to measure point-spread functions. While the students work on statistics in lecture (see Fig.~\ref{fig:sample-datasets}), in the lab they determine the age and distance of the Hyades star cluster, with associated uncertainties, using data from the Hipparcos satellite. The statistics unit culminates in a lab on signal-to-noise in astronomical observations, where students hone their intuition for how sensitivity depends on exposure time, telescope aperture, and atmospheric conditions.