In 2021, I worked on a year-long (Feb - Nov 2021) thesis project for my BSc Honours in Astronomy degree. The aim of the project was to develop code to process, clean, and analyze datasets of astronomical images of comets and asteroids taken using the 1.8-metre telescope at Mt. John Observatory in New Zealand. As a result of this project, I have developed 5 distinct code repositories which work together to complete the task of processing and analyzing these datasets. This Markdown file lists the repositories in the order they are supposed to be used.
About the Data: The datasets of images are stored on local university servers and are not currently publicly accessible. They are .FITS files, which is a common image file format used in astronomy. I collected these data myself at the 1.8-metre telescope at Mt. John Observatory during 2020 - 2021. There are 3 types of image files, ALERT, which are telescope CCD images of the comets and asteroids I observed. There are also DARK images and FLAT images, which are calibration data needed in the data reduction process.
This pipeline ingests the raw data, and uses the calibration files to calibrate the images, and output the calibrated images as .FITS files. The pipeline also produces diagnostic information, logs and plots. This pipeline is unit-tested.
This pipeline uses the previous pipeline's calibrated image files, and uses a website's API to upload, process, and retrieve information on the positions of stars in each image. The retrieved information is appended to the calibrated image files, and these updated calibrated images are outputted. The pipeline also produces diagnostic information, logs and plots.
This pipeline uses the previous pipeline's updated calibrated image files, and the light measurements for the stars in the image are calculated. These light measurements are then used to calibrate for the actual brightness of the stars, in a process known as relative flux photometry. Finally, the brightness from the comet or asteroid is calculated and a light curve for each comet/asteroid is plotted for all the nights it was observed. The pipeline also produces diagnostic information, logs and plots.
This repository contains functions and scripts to calculate various statistics and information related to the comets and asteroids, and of the telescope equipment.
This repository contains functions to convert between object tracking rates of the 1.8-metre telescope, and a 0.6-metre telescope at Mt. John Observatory, in order to understand the object's rate of motion.