AstroTerps

Welcome!

Welcome to the AstroTerps Code Database, the central hub of AstroTerps coding activity. See below for the unresolved tasks we have to work on, the code we have completed, and sample data to play with.

Code

• oscaar: Differential photometry code written by Brett Morris

Projects

1. Light Pollution Data Preparation
   • Some of the photos of examples of lighting on campus collected on Nov 2 and 9, 2011 are prepared in bundles and ready to be formatted. If you have some of those photos and they're not already organized or posted below, contact us!
   • Download the following packages of images, uncompress them and do the following:

     Name	Size (MB)	Campus Section	Author
     LPpackage1.zip	59	3	Steffi Yen
     LPpackage2.zip	55	3	Steffi Yen
     LPpackage3.zip	75	3	Steffi Yen
     LPpackage4.zip	77	3	Steffi Yen
     LPpackage5.zip	56	3	Steffi Yen
     LPpackage6.zip	73	3	Steffi Yen
     LPpackage7.zip	76	3	Steffi Yen

     1. Some of the photos will be bad. If you would not use them in a PowerPoint, delete them! There are enough photos that we can be critical of blurry ones.
     2. Put their names in the following format:
        
        "[Building Number]-[index number].jpg"
        
        For building numbers, refer to this database. So for your first image of CSS, name it "224-01.jpg". Always keep one padding zero on your index to make life easy on our coders.
     3. Compress the folder of renamed images to .zip format and contact us. Since they are too big to email we will probably ask you to give them to us in person.
2. AstroTerps Website Overhaul
   • Part I: HTML Cleanup
     • The AstroTerps website has taken a bit of a beating by being passed from year to year to different people with different knowledge and style in HTML and CSS. It looks pretty good in most browsers but if you open up the source, it could use some tidying up!
     • Goal: Comb through the HTML to each page of the site and doll it up with the appropriate HTML5 structure, style, indentation, etc; make it pass validation.
     • There are some instances where style is dictated in the HTML, swap these out for CSS alternatives, so that we can do Part II!
     • If you're interested in meticulously doing ALL of the HTML cleanup on your own and claiming all the credit, send us an email and we'll replace this bullet on the website with your name. This will let the other coders know someone is working on the project, but the one we'll use is most likely the one we receive first!
   • Part II: CSS Design Contest
     • Once the website is in a solid, validated state, we can move on to experimenting with different looks.
     • You're welcome to design style sheets that change the website's look as much or as little as you want. Your only constraint is to try to limit the number of changes we will have to make to the HTML code to achieve your design.
     • Once we have a few CSS submissions, we'll post a contest in which members will vote on which design they like best. The winner gets eternal fame and glory through the publication of their design and a couple of authorship acknowledgements on the site.
   • Download the source (3.3 MB) of the website as it was on Nov 3, 2011 and start tinkering with its components. I have not included all of the data and gallery images that are present on the real website to minimize the size of the download.
3. Design a fun RGB composite image interface

Sample Data

Date	Size (MB)	Objects	Filters	Author
Aug 10, 2011	133	M11, M31, M57	R, G, B	Brett Morris, Harley Katz
Oct 6, 2011	6.4	Jupiter	Ha, OIII, R, V	Brett Morris
Oct 20, 2011	16	Jupiter, M57	Ha, OIII, R, V	Brett Morris
Oct 21, 2011	210	M42	Ha, OIII, SII	Brett Morris
Nov 2, 2011	75	Jupiter	Ha, OIII, R, G, B	Brett Morris
Nov 17, 2011	113	Jupiter, M42	Ha, OIII, SII	Brett Morris, Jesse Furman

Short Descriptions

• Aug 10, 2011: (Not the greatest) Multiwavelength images of the Wild Duck Cluster (M11), the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Ring Nebula (M57). Stacked images of the Ring Nebula are included, or can be downloaded separately here.
• Oct 6, 2011: Multiwavelength images of Jupiter
• Oct 20, 2011: Multiwavelength images of Jupiter, Ring Nebula (M57), lots of short exposures to stack. Download (mostly) aligned M57 images here.
• Oct 21, 2011: Multiwavelength images of the Orion Nebula (M42), lots of exposures to stack. Flat field and dark frame corrected stacks for each filter can be downloaded here.
• Nov 2, 2011: Big set of multiwavelength images of Jupiter taken on the 20".
• Nov 17, 2011: Multiwavelength images of the Orion Nebula (M42), lots of exposures to stack. Taken the night of the 2011 Leonids. Flat field and dark frame corrected stacks for each filter can be downloaded here.

Utility Belt

• SAOImage DS9 is the standard FITS file viewer used by astronomers (and it's free!).