Status: Approved for review release; not yet approved for instructional use. See review-report.md for full findings and outstanding items.
Course Planning
Lectures
Lecture 01: The Observing Chain and Telescope Optics Fundamentals — slides · notes
Lecture 02: Diffraction, the Rayleigh Criterion, and Telescope Resolution — slides · notes
Lecture 03: Plate Scale, Field of View, and Focal-Plane Geometry — slides · notes
Lecture 04: CCD Detectors: Architecture, Quantum Efficiency, and Charge Transfer — slides · notes
Lecture 05: Detector Noise: Read Noise, Dark Current, and CMOS/IR Arrays — slides · notes
Lecture 06: The CCD Signal-to-Noise Equation and Exposure Time Calculators — slides · notes
Lecture 07: Calibration Frames: Bias, Dark, Flat-Field, and Standard Stars — slides · notes
Lecture 08: Photometric Filter Systems — slides · notes
Lecture 09: Spectrograph Fundamentals: The Grating Equation and Dispersion — slides · notes
Lecture 10: Resolving Power, Echelle Spectrographs, and Slit/Fiber-Fed Systems — slides · notes
Lecture 11: Adaptive Optics: Wavefront Sensing and the Strehl Ratio — slides · notes
Lecture 12: Space-Based Instruments and Observatory Operations — slides · notes
Lecture 13: Radiometric Error Budgets and Instrument Sensitivity Modeling — slides · notes
Lecture 14: Instrument Proposal Design: Capstone Synthesis — slides · notes
Labs
Lab 01: Diffraction-Limited Resolution Across Five Real Telescopes
Lab 02: Plate Scale, Pixel Scale, and the Nyquist Sampling Criterion
Lab 03: Building a CCD Exposure-Time Calculator
Lab 04: Photometric Calibration and Zero-Point Derivation
Lab 05: The Grating Equation and HIRES’s Resolving Power
Lab 06: Adaptive Optics Strehl Ratios at K Band and V Band
Lab 07: Capstone: Instrument Proposal Design and Error Budget
Problem Sets
Problem Set 01 · solutions · assessment
Problem Set 02 · solutions · assessment
Problem Set 03 · solutions · assessment
Problem Set 04 · solutions · assessment
Problem Set 05 · solutions · assessment
Problem Set 06 · solutions · assessment
Problem Set 07 · solutions · assessment