CHESTER, Vt. – The Southern Vermont Astronomy Group would love for you to join us on Tuesday, Feb. 14, at 7 p.m. for a special event with expert speaker Dr. Michael Richmond. Dr. Richmond will be presenting his talk “The Long Journey from a Raw Image to a Calibrated Light Curve.” This will be a virtual meeting at www.zoom.us/j/94691230307.
Astronomers of all sorts, amateur and professional, use their telescopes to take images of objects in the night sky. But before we can use those images for scientific purposes, we need to clean them up, correcting for defects in the optical system and the camera. We must also account for extinction by the passing clouds and the Earth’s atmosphere in general, and then calibrate the results so that we can compare them properly to measurements made with other telescopes. Dr. Richmond will explain these procedures and show examples of pictures and measurements, ending with some light curves created with a 12-inch telescope in cloudy Rochester, N.Y.
Michael Richmond is an astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, specializing in software and the study of transient objects. He enjoys frequent trips to the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and to the Institute of Astronomy in Tokyo, but is happy to observe with the small telescopes on campus as well.