Rooftop Variables

Observing

Useful things for RV observers include:

A Brief History of Telescopes (introductory handout)
Telescope Interiors and Mounts: A Comparison
- To introduce Alt-Az and Equatorial mounts and explore how they differ, when they are appropriate, etc.
- To discuss different types of telescope models (refractors, reflectors, etc.) with a focus on how light travels through each.
Magnification and Field of View: An Introduction
- Exploration through the use of eyepieces of the relationship between magnification and field of view.
Using an Optics Bench to Build a Telescope
- A brief explanation of optics and lenses, and in particular of focal lengths and image inversion.

Orienting Yourself on the Sky (handout)
Understanding the Celestial Sphere
- An exploration of celestial spheres that highlights that, while incorrect in their cosmology, they can help visualize the way the sky seems to move as viewed from Earth.
From the Celestial Sphere to the Planisphere
- A bridge from thinking about the sky motions with the celestial sphere to actually using those motions in a useful way on the planisphere.
Sky Visualization with Stellarium
- Stellarium is a (free) planetarium for your computer. It can show you a view of the sky from any location on the Earth right now or a few thousand years in the past or future.
Sky Visualization with Starry Night
- Using the computer program Starry Night, participants explore how the Earth's motions are manifested in the sky we view.
An Introduction to Parallax

History of Astronomical Detectors (handout)
A Guide to CCDs
- A hands-on experiment which treats the CCD as a grid of buckets to be filled with photons (beans).
- Adapted by Liz Castelli for use with middle-school students; available here.
CCD Images - A Tutorial
- Discussion and manipulation of real CCD images. Review of flats, darks, and images.
CCD Image Processing - An Introduction
- Short introduction to astronomical data processing.