Optical Astronomy - Science topic

I concur with Ahmad Adel Alsakati

Thanks dear Alvaro :)

Arms of LIGO are physically 4 KM long. However, in each arm the laser beam moves to and fro 280 times. That is, in effect the beam travels 4x280=1120 KM in each arm. This is achieved by a Fabry-Pe'rot cavity placed in each arm of LIGO. Notice that near the beam splitter there is a mirror and also at the end of the arm there is a second mirror. These two mirrors together form a Fabry-Pe'rot cavity. Due to the presence of this optical cavity, the effect of a passing gravitational wave on the light phase is enhanced by a factor of 300.

LIGO interferometer is thus a basic Michelson interferometer with enhancements. Following are some enhancements,

A Few Things You Need to Know to Tell if a Mathematical Physicist is Talking Nonsense: the Black Hole - a Case Study, 29 July, 2015

You can read these reports

1. A panchromatic view of AGN (Risaliti) http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403618

2. Seyfert galaxies in the local Universe (z≤ 0.1): the average X-ray spectrum as seen by BeppoSAX (Dadina) http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4338

3. Revisiting the Unified Model of Active Galactic Nuclei (Netzer) http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00811v1

There is another way to find IR spectrum of hot water  by yourself through the well-known software LBLRTM (one software for atmosphere). It is not difficult to run the software LBLRTM.

Telescope/mount control is fairly simple - namely "point at this!". Users will generally specify "this" in J2000 coordinates, not current epoch, so you should do the conversion for them. I've never had a need for lunar or other exotic tracking variants. You may want to support "tracking off" for TDI or imaging geostationary satellites (which is fun). Because my mount is so poor, I've automated taking a pointing image, computing a plate solution and sending a correction to the scope, so it's genuinely pointing at the target before taking the "science" image. You can probably use a TPoint model instead. If you have an automated focuser, you could implement your own temperature and filter compensation. Camera control is the real challenge. Useful parameters to expose to users include binning, filter, subframe, exposure, raw/dark/reduced (ie. do you want image calibrated or not). I've gone a bit further to automate stacking and tiling of images. I also compute a plate solution and embed it in the final FITS image.