Astronomical Techniques

This repository contains tutorials that I developed for the ASTR 350 (undergraduate) and ASTR 680 (graduate) astronomical techniques courses at San Diego State University (SDSU). Each tutorial consists of an incomplete Jupyter notebook and a link to a lecture video in which the complete material is presented. Students are instructed to watch the videos and to complete the tutorials on their own before class meetings, which are mainly used for review, discussion, and application of the material.

The listing below provides links to the videos and demonstrates a possible ordering of the tutorials for the undergraduate version of the course. (Note that additional material is covered through traditional lectures as well).

Introduction to Python coding

• Unix Intro -- notebook / video (23 min)

• GitHub Overview -- notebook / video (19 min)

• Jupyter Notebooks -- notebook / video (10 min)

• Python Intro -- notebook / video (40 min)

• Python Functions -- notebook / video (28 min)

• Numpy -- notebook / video (25 min)

• Matplotlib -- notebook / video (15 min)

• Python Debugger -- notebook / video (10 min)

• astropy -- notebook / video (25 min)

• FITS Format (+DS9) -- notebook / video (44 min)

Statistical analysis (part 1)

• Statistical Distributions -- notebook / video (30 min)

• Uncertainty Propagation -- notebook / video (10 min)

Introduction to CCD image analysis

• telescopes notebook / video (27 min)

• CCDs -- notebook / video (28 min)

• CCD image processing -- notebook / video (28 min)

• Making color images -- notebook / video (24 min)

Least-Squares Fitting

• Least-Squares Fitting -- notebook / video (34 min)

• LSQ-Fitting with Coordinate Shift -- notebook / video (19 min)

• Least-Squares fitting example -- notebook / video (29 min)

Photometry

• sigma-clipping -- notebook / video (20 min)

• Photometry -- notebook / video (38 min)

Statistical analysis (part 2)

• SciPy -- notebook / video (25 min)

• chi-square -- notebook / video (27 min)

• Bootstrap -- notebook / video (28 min)

• Lomb-Scargle Periodogram -- notebook / video (28 min)

Spectroscopy

• Spectroscopy (lecture) -- notebook / video (lecture from the 2020 GROWTH Summer School)

• Spectroscopy (quick extraction) -- notebook (notebook from the 2020 GROWTH Summer School) / [notebook only]

• Spectroscopy (in-depth guide) -- notebook / [notebook only]

Additional tutorials

• Latex -- notebook / video (14 min)

• K-S testing -- notebook / video (24 min)

• Coordinate Matching -- notebook / video (28 min)

• SQL -- notebook / video (31 min)

• Astroquery -- notebook / video (24 min)