Unanswered Questions
57 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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What are the pros and cons of different types of echelle spectrograph cross-dispersers?
Echelle spectrographs, operating at high resolving power, typically consist of an echelle grating with a low numbers of lines/mm, used with high diffraction orders (often $n=$50-100). To separate the ...
6
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Need help understanding stellar spectroscopy data from ESO
The European Southern Observatory webpage has a web page that has tabular spectrogram data from A. J. Pickles, University of Hawaii. There are over 130 .dat files there. Each one represents a ...
5
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457
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Why does titanium oxide around Betelgeuse produce this particular sawtooth-shaped absorption spectrum?
Betelgeuse Just Isn’t That Cool: Effective Temperature Alone Cannot Explain the Recent Dimming of Betelgeuse suggests that the recent dimming might be caused by increased optical absorption by dust ...
4
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How does SDSS estimate photometric redshift of sources?
I'm looking through the data in SDSS DR 12:
...
4
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54
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What happens to the non-fusion formed metals in stars?
Let’s consider a population I star of some given metallicity.
I know that depending on the type of star, different structures are possible with convection zones and radiative zones trading around ...
4
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A simple echelle spectrograph for viewing solar spectrum
On the Astrosurf website here, someone has designed a deceptively simple echelle spectrograph for viewing solar spectrum. Briefly, light from an optical fiber falls on an echelle grating and which is ...
4
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How is the roll of the Hubble telescope around its axis and the dispersive direction(s) of it's spectrometer(s) managed?
Reading Dupree et al. 2020 Spatially Resolved Ultraviolet Spectroscopy of the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse (also in arXiv and summarized in Phys.org's Hubble finds that Betelgeuse's mysterious dimming ...
4
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69
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How significant is the effect of galactic rotation on line broadening of carbon monoxide?
In class the other day, we were discussing observations of rotational transitions of carbon monoxide, namely, the $J=1\to0$ and $J=2\to1$ lines. We originally had assumed that both lines would have ...
4
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How to calculate magnitudes in photometry?
I have a passband filter $b$ and a spectrum (SED) $f_{\lambda}(\lambda)$. Often the formula I find to get the flux in that filter $F_b$ is
$$F_{b}=\dfrac{\int f_{\lambda}(\lambda) T_{b}(\lambda)d\...
3
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Why MIT's Benjamin Rackham says "nearby ultracool dwarf SPECULOOS-3" would look "purplish-red, spotted, and flaring" from an airless orbiting planet?
May 15, 2024 MIT News article Newly discovered Earth-sized planet may lack an atmosphere includes the following:
“We can say from our spectra and other observations that the star has a temperature of ...
3
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What instruments do amateur astronomers use in their ground based telescopes in order to avoid atmospheric absorption/telluric contamination?
What instruments do amateur astronomers use in their ground based telescopes in order to avoid atmospheric absorption/telluric contamination? For example, when an astronomer observes a celestial body ...
3
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How to obtain exoplanets transmission spectra from JWST's NIRISS data of WASP96?
I was having a look at JWST's NIRISS data of WASP96 (specifically at the x1dints fits file which should be already calibrated). From this, I would like to obtain a result in a fashion similar to the ...
3
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0
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79
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S/N binning of 2D spectral galactic data
I have the 2D spectrum of the ellipical galaxy NGC 4697 taken by a long slit spectrograph. The x-direction (horizontal) corresponds to wavelength and the y-direction (vertical) corresponds to distance ...
3
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191
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Is there a tool to convert N-body RAMSES simulation file formats to GADGET 2 format in Python?
I am looking for a way to convert RAMSES files to GADGET-2 binary files because I want to use the package SimSpin (https://github.com/kateharborne/SimSpin/blob/master/R/make_simspin_file.R) which is ...
3
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How were "microshutters" or other multiplexed or multi-object techniques first used in Astronomical spectroscopy?
This answer to How will microshutter arrays be used in the James Webb and future space telescopes? explains how multiple objects can be selected so that the throughput of a spectrometer can be ...