Quasar Quest

The task this year is to study how the brightness of a quasar changes over the course of a few weeks and use that variability to try to understand a bit more about the quasars themselves.

Measuring the brightness of an object is one of the most important measurments in astronomy, so we will take a little bit of time learning how it is done.

While you are doing this you will learn several things:

1. What Image Data from telescopes is like.
2. How to download the Data (observations).
3. How to use the Image Processing software, LTImage.
4. How brightness is measured and how some of the problems are overcome.

Task 1.  Ask your teacher to make sure that the Image Processing Software (LTImage) is installed (the software can be downloaded from here).

Task 2.  Download some example observations.

Task 3.  Learn how to use the software (LTImage) to explore astronomical images.

Task 4.  Learn how to Measure Brightness with LTImage.