Obtaining and Interpreting Astronomical Data

Author(s):  
Miroslav D. Filipović ◽  
Nicholas F. H. Tothill
Keyword(s):  
1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 116-117
Author(s):  
P.-I. Eriksson

Nowadays more and more of the reductions of astronomical data are made with electronic computers. As we in Uppsala have an IBM 1620 at the University, we have taken it to our help with reductions of spectrophotometric data. Here I will briefly explain how we use it now and how we want to use it in the near future.


1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 348-349
Author(s):  
Th. Schmidt-Kaler

This is only an informal remark about some difficulties I am worrying about.I have tried to recalibrate the MK system in terms of intrinsic colour (B–V)0and absolute magnitudeMv. The procedures used have been described in a review article by Voigt (Mitt. Astr. Ges.1963, p. 25–35), and the results for stars of the luminosity classes Ia-O,I and II have been given also in Blaauw's article on the calibration of luminosity criteria in vol. III (Basic Astronomical Data, p. 401) ofStars and Stellar Systems.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-168
Author(s):  
Sebastian Kühn ◽  
Bill Rebiger

Abstract In the astronomical journal books written in German of Gottfried Kirch (1639–1710), a Christian astronomer and publisher with close connections to Pietists, several entries in Hebrew script are striking. In fact, it is not Hebrew or Yiddish but German in Hebrew characters. There is no doubt that the transcription follows more or less an orthography known from Yiddish. Since the content of these entries is rather banal and reflects daily life, it is possible that they are nothing but a kind of scholarly joke, a private pleasure, and practice of scholarly skills. While these private notes were not capable of academic discourse, perhaps Kirch playfully tried to enhance their status by using an uncommon script in contrast to the astronomical data. In this way, it was possible to cover over the triviality of daily life by a veil of mystery by transcribing it in Hebrew characters.


2013 ◽  
pp. 53-64
Author(s):  
V. Böhm ◽  
B. Böhm ◽  
J. Klokocník ◽  
J. Vondrák ◽  
J. Kostelecký

The relationship between Maya and our calendar is expressed by a coefficient known as ?correlation? which is a number of days that we have to add to the Mayan Long Count date to get Julian Date used in astronomy. There is surprisingly large uncertainty in the value of the correlation, yielding a shift between both calendars (and thus between the history of Maya and of our world) to typically several hundred years. There are more than 50 diverse values of the correlation, some of them derived from historical, other by astronomical data. We test here (among others) the well established Goodman-Mart?nez-Thompson correlation (GMT), based on historical data, and the B?hms? one (B&B), based on astronomical data decoded from the Dresden Codex (DC); this correlation differs by about +104 years from the GMT. In our previous works we used several astronomical phenomena as recorded in the DC for a check. We clearly demonstrated that (i) the GMT was not capable to predict these phenomena that really happened in nature and (ii) that the GMT predicts them on the days when they did not occur. The phenomena used till now in the test are, however, short-periodic and the test then may suffer from ambiguity. Therefore, we add long-periodic astronomical phenomena, decoded successfully from the DC, to the testing. These are (i) a synchrony of Venusian heliacal risings with the solar eclipses, (ii) a synchrony of Venus and Mars conjunctions with the eclipses, (iii) conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn repeated in a rare way, and (iv) a synchrony of synodic and sideric periods of Mercury with the tropical year. Based on our analysis, we find that the B&B correlation yields the best agreement with the astronomical phenomena observed by the Maya. Therefore we recommend to reject the GMT and support the B&B correlation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amri Wandel

AbstractThe data recently accumulated by the Kepler mission have demonstrated that small planets are quite common and that a significant fraction of all stars may have an Earth-like planet within their habitable zone. These results are combined with a Drake-equation formalism to derive the space density of biotic planets as a function of the relatively modest uncertainty in the astronomical data and of the (yet unknown) probability for the evolution of biotic life, Fb. I suggest that Fb may be estimated by future spectral observations of exoplanet biomarkers. If Fb is in the range 0.001–1, then a biotic planet may be expected within 10–100 light years from Earth. Extending the biotic results to advanced life I derive expressions for the distance to putative civilizations in terms of two additional Drake parameters – the probability for evolution of a civilization, Fc, and its average longevity. For instance, assuming optimistic probability values (Fb~Fc~1) and a broadcasting longevity of a few thousand years, the likely distance to the nearest civilizations detectable by searching for intelligent electromagnetic signals is of the order of a few thousand light years. The probability of detecting intelligent signals with present and future radio telescopes is calculated as a function of the Drake parameters. Finally, I describe how the detection of intelligent signals would constrain the Drake parameters.


1982 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 203-205
Author(s):  
A. Fernandez ◽  
M.C. Lortet ◽  
F. Spite

AbstractThe confusing situation of the nomenclature of the astronomical objects led us to build, as a first step, a dictionary of the designations presently used. The future publication of this work is supported by Commission 5 of IAU. A brief description of this dictionary, as well as a sample of it, is given here. The designations (acronyms) will be given, together with the format, the total number of objects, the type of objects, the code for the complete bibliographical reference, the signification of acronym… Nomenclature for X and γ-ray sources, designations by constellations and descriptive designations will be dealt with as well. Good compilations are a considerable help in nomenclature problems; every effort should be made in order of : 1) urging specialists to build compilations 2) announce compilations in progress to Astronomical Data Centers and to the present authors.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (S306) ◽  
pp. 279-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hobson ◽  
Philip Graff ◽  
Farhan Feroz ◽  
Anthony Lasenby

AbstractMachine-learning methods may be used to perform many tasks required in the analysis of astronomical data, including: data description and interpretation, pattern recognition, prediction, classification, compression, inference and many more. An intuitive and well-established approach to machine learning is the use of artificial neural networks (NNs), which consist of a group of interconnected nodes, each of which processes information that it receives and then passes this product on to other nodes via weighted connections. In particular, I discuss the first public release of the generic neural network training algorithm, calledSkyNet, and demonstrate its application to astronomical problems focusing on its use in the BAMBI package for accelerated Bayesian inference in cosmology, and the identification of gamma-ray bursters. TheSkyNetand BAMBI packages, which are fully parallelised using MPI, are available athttp://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/software/.


2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (13) ◽  
pp. 2007-2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
SERGIO DEL CAMPO ◽  
J. R. VILLANUEVA

In this paper we study a quintessence cosmological model in which the dark energy component is considered to be the generalized Chaplygin gas and the curvature of the three-geometry is taken into account. Two parameters characterize this sort of fluid: ν and α. We use different astronomical data for restricting these parameters. It is shown that the constraint ν ≲ α agrees well enough with the astronomical observations.


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