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Image calibration
Image calibration is simply the removal of the anomalies from the camera sensor and imperfections in the optical pathway. When taking astronomical pictures, this helps make the image "pretty." When...
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Linearity testing
Figure 1. CCD bucket analogy (Howell 2006)Each pixel of a CCD sensor is like a bucket, but instead of collecting rain water, these buckets collect electrons that are generated by the incoming photons....
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Swan Song
Figure 1. Henrietta Swan Leavitt (Johnson 2005)Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born on the Fourth of July in 1868 in Lancaster Massachusetts to George Roswell Leavitt and his wife, also named Henrietta Swan...
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Using Stellarium to Control a Telescope
One of the most awesome features of modern amateur telescopes is that they can connect with a computer to allow control by a wide assortment of software. Planetarium software is particularly cool...
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Binning
Binning groups pixels together which has the effect of making the group appear as a bigger single pixel as shown in figure 1 below (Templeton & Beck 2014). Binning is done to decrease the...
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Frosty the Protoplanetary Disk Snowline
A key idea in astronomy is that stars form from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. The left over materials from the star formation swirl around the star in a flat plane known as a protoplanetary disk....
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One Disk to Rule Them All
Figure 1. A typical dwarf nova. Credit NASA via www.skyandtelescope.comIn a study accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), astronomers Aranzana et al....
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Support for Magnetic Complexity in Cataclysmic Variables
Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are binary systems consisting of a white dwarf and a secondary "normal" star. Material from the secondary star gets stripped away and forms an accretion disk around the...
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Carnival of Space #581
Hi everyone, I'm hosting the 581st Carnival of Space where we assemble the best in space science and astronomy reporting. If you have a related website or blog, please consider joining us. Here is the...
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