How To Do Astronomical Observations

Generals for amateurs to pros

September 2020

To understand how astronomical observations for gaining scientific intel are per-
formed, one has not to start at the beginning device aided observations. The follow-
ing will describe how the sky can be explored in the optical wavelength band of the
electromagnetic spectrum around the year 2020. We will not dive into the details
of how detectors work because this document is an overview on what astronomers,
amateurs and pros, do to collect evaluable data. We will not discuss the evalua-
tion itself nor how the devices were developed. As we focus on the optical part of
the spectrum in the range of near infrared to near ultraviolet, we will talk about
the limitations the different observer groups have to face. Since this document is
meant to be a brief but usable introduction to evaluate the equipment and methods
needed, we won’t go into background discussions.

Background, Amateur vs. Pro, Limits

Background
As said in the abstract above, we won’t start with Galillei, who used a toy from some danish
merchants on a flew market as an idea for a scientific instrument for the first time, we will start
right where modern observers start when they want to enter this field of science - astronomy.
On our way down to successful observations we have to do some definitions on words we will
use for there on as standards. We will do this derived from the pros because they were the
once who invented all the nice little things like instruments, techniques and methods with the
intension of collecting undoubtable data. We will later see what one has to do to get the data
reduced to what essential to be unquestionable, because this separates science from religion.
So let’s start with the medium we have to deal with - the sky. To be precise: the night sky. Ok,
of course exploring the daylight sky has it’s vindication but only for the one star that is visible
than - the sun. We will leave that one out, because what’s needed for sun observation is just a
specialty of what can be used for the suns of the night. But let’s go back to the medium we have
to deal with - the night sky. When we stay outside in the countryside and lift our eyes up to the
sky, our eyes can see nearly 6000 stars. Our view is limited to what is not covered by our planet
plus that what surrounds us by nature like trees, bushes, rocks, hills, mountains. Different to
what nature built are the things we humans added to the surroundings like buildings, street
lamps or man made hills (of garbage). With building cities and enlighten them, we created on
excessive limitation we will talk about later. But let’s get back to the countryside and assume
we have a mathematical horizon which will be our first wort to define.

Mathematical horizon It is defined as the horizon only limited by the curvature of the planet.

Both hemispheres of the sky cover 540000 square degrees, so here we have the next thing -
degrees. Since we assume our planet is some kind of sphere we use a coordinate system to
deal with it and use angles for positions like right ascension and declination. Right ascension
is given in angle hours, minutes and seconds which can easily be converted to degrees back

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and forth but since our earth is rotating it is beneficial to use hours. But these benefits will
become clear later when we talk about finding objects and their positions. For the moment we
just accept that these words exist and are angles, which is enough to imagine why the sky has
square degrees as measuring units.
As we know from school lessons, the sky is blue, because the blue light beams are the first
to be broken away by our atmosphere. And there it is. The atmosphere! As we know from
school, too, earth has and atmosphere consisting of gases that enables us to breath. It’s mixture
contains 78% nitrogen, 20,95% oxygen, 0,93% Argon, 0,04% carbon dioxide and several traits
of other inert gases. But that’s not all, there are particles like dust or faint drops of water, too
which leads us to another limitation we have to talk about later. Like all gases, we have features
like pressure, temperature and humidity that have effects on each other causing weather. An
important factor of this gas mixture is that it response to radiation emitted by the sun. Our
weather depends to 99% on what radiation comes from the sun and how our position is on our
path around the sun. This causes seasons and on long time scales climate. But we won’t go
into further detail because what only is important to us now is that we have to deal with the
effects caused by the atmosphere and it’s containments like the gases, dust and water. Gas and
dust in the concentration of our atmosphere has a denseness which effects light. As most people
don’t know temperature is the measurement for movement and not for heat. That means the
lower the temperature is the slower the movements of the particles are. The lesser the pressure
is the lesser the denseness is, too and the temperature gets lower because the movement slows
down, too. The movement of the air particles is called seeing and we get the best impression of
it when we think of a hot road in summer when we see the flickering. Normally, we don’t see it
because it’s not that hugh, but when temperature and pressure are up it gets visible. We keep
that in mind for now, because it will get back to us, when we talk about limitations.
So out atmosphere effects what we can see in the night sky. The movement of the particles is
responsible for the flickering of the stars, as explained above and the flickering is a good hint
about the conditions. The lesses the flickering the better the condintions for the observations.
So what do the particles in the atmosphere do to the light beams which are traveling through
the air? The particles deflect the beams and separate them in such way, that the blue light
is the first to be scattered all over the sky making it blue. The reg light is the last one to be
scattered which you can see when there is afterglow at sunset or sunrise.
Because of the distortions the particles do to the paths of the light beams, the thicker the air
gets, the more distorted the paths will be which results in mistakes when it comes to determine
the position of a light source or it’s brightness because the light is deflected.
To cut a long story short, possible observations of the nigh sky have to deal with several detail
one won’t get aware of by just lieing on a blanket under the night sky. At this point devices
like telescopes, cameras, photo- and spectrometer enter the stage which helps us to refine the
observations.
As I mentioned above, there are already two good questions to answer about an object: where
it is and how bright it is.
Telescope A telescope is a magnifying instrument. It’s resolution is defined by and only by
it’s diameter, not by it’s focal length. The magnification is defined by the combination of
the focal length of an eye piece and the focal length of the telescope itself. There are two
different systems: refractors and reflectors. Both system make use of glas which exists in
different recipes. Reflectors uses glas mirrors to focus the light beams where refractors
make use of the refracting power of the medium through which it travels. Since glas is
a viscose fluid lenses have a production limit and bent under is own mass, so one can’t
built lenses in any size. Mirrors are covered which a reflection material like aluminium
or silver and their glas body can be executed as thin as stability allows resulting in large

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 homogenous mirrors like the onces used for Keck II oder VLT (please look them up if you
have to). Another difference is, that refractor always have chromatic aberration which
increase the large the lense gets. Reflectors do not lack and are called color free. Both
systems share other limitations like image distortion (coma/astigmatism).

Detectors/Cameras In General a detector collects light photons and shows a reaction to the
transfered energy of a photon on impact. They range from silver covered glas plates, to
photographic films, to devices which use the photoelectric effect described by Albert Ein-
stein rewarded with Nobel prize. The latter comprise photometer which can be imagined
as one pixel cameras, and the more modern know digital chips called ccd or cmos.

To answer the two question above about where and how much, telescopes are combine with
cameras and mounted on something to keep them solid attached to the ground but moveable
to right every visible point in the night sky. This leads us to the mounting, which nowadays is
computer driven to reach agility and precision to get the most out of the telescope,camera and
the sky.
When it comes to mounting, the earlier mentioned coordinate system comes back it, which
helps us to pinpoint an object and later revisited it by the computer drives mount for further
observations. This leads is to object catalogs, object classification and gathering information
about the nature of an object which further leads us to understand how the universe works.

Amateurs vs Pros
That’s right! There are several differences between people how are mining the sky to earn a
living and those who are interested in the subject as a hobby. Of course the range of how
serious one takes it is huge. Some amateurs reach the same quality as the once how to that
for living, but the greater amount of amateurs is satisfied with much lesser effort. The more
ambitious the observer is the larger the equipment gets because, as mentioned above, diameter
defines the resolution, detector size the field of view and pixel size the sampling, the larger the
mount gets the more optics it can carry.
The available amount of money which can be spent on equipment defines how sophisticated
one can get and that defines what methods one uses, if one wants to find out something new
about the universe or just wants to make an artist impression on others.
One can do scientific work with less equipment like tracking moon distances on dates, planetary
positions, comets if oberservation position and time is captured. Therefore just a digital camera
on a tripod is needed. If you want to measure how dark matter distorts spacetime, a telescope
with at least 10” on a steady computer driven mount with guiding device (camera) and a cooled
imaging camera plus filter wheel is required and additionally sophisticated software for guiding,
imaging, data reduction and analysis. Both ends of the scale are reachable for the amateur.
So why does the pros need telescopes and camera worth billions of dollars? Because of the
resolution and therefor the things to discover which are limited by it. Not every in astronomy
interested person has the interlectual potential to distinguish the patterns of the universe.
Those who have can uncover the secrets for the others and convert the generated knowledge
into technology all the others can use to make life easier or reduce suffering.
Many discoveries are done be amateurs because we do have to much spacetime for too few
pros to cover. As I mentioned earlier, there are amateurs who get beyond pros in their line of
subject, which is very good and commendable.

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Limits
As I pointed out, limits exists! Planet based optical observations face several limits. The
atmosphere effects positional and photometric features, distorting the beams. Devices like
telescopes have limits in how huge and in what quality they can be built. Cameras are limited
in the amount of photons they can convert into electrons called quantum efficency and how
good the sampling, the quality to map what the resolution shows, is. Mounts are limited by
the weight they can carry, the agility of the motors attached to the mount and the resolution
of the control to move the telescope around smoothly. The resolution of the motion drives
defines how good the pointing and the keeping of the pointing by coping with the seeing is.
The seeing, if it can’t be tricked out, limits the reached resolution further more so that a 10”
telescope won’t reach the resolution it would mathematically have. Just to mention the most
important once.
Some of the limits can be tricked out, some reduced to an acceptable amount by acceptable
effort (money, time). But some still remain like the atmosphere itself. Here space telescopes
kick in, which we won’t cover in this document. That would go to far for a summarizing
overview on how astronomical observations are done in general. We will talk about what one
can do about some limits while explaining the technical details on the devices.

Instrumentation
When it comes to instrumentation, we talk about telescopes, eye pieces, cameras, spectrographs
and so on. There are to main types of telescope, from here on referred to as optics, the refractor
and the reflector. Both will be discussed further in subsection ”Optics”.
Since eye pieces are a different kind of optics but only necessary for use with the human eye,
we will leave them out.
Next we will take a look at cameras which contain digital detectors.
Spectrographs and other additional devices like things that provide active or adaptive optics
will be let out, too.

Optics
As mentioned above we are talking about telescopes. In general a telescope used in the optical
wavelength band, is a magnifying instrument that uses two types of optical elements made of
glass. One can build lenses or mirror by grinding curves.

Refractors
With lenses one builds refractors which uses light’s ability to travel through the glass by being
broken away. The magnification is reached by the curvature of the lens. There are two ways
a curvature can be executed, concave and convex. Concave curvature ’collects’ light beams,
convex scatters them. If one combines them in a smart way certain magnifications can be
reached. The focal length defines where the eye piece or detector has to be an therefor how
long the telescope will be, which defines how huge the mount has to be, to carry the weight
and make the telescope moveable without restraining the movement.
There are some drawbacks by light refraction. Lenses can’t be build in any size. When the
diameter reaches about 1 meter, the lense gets so have that it will deform under it’s own weight
through gravity so it will give a distorted image. Light refraction it self is problematic too,
because different wavelength behave differently so one gets a phaenomenon called chromatic

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 Figure 1: [2]

aberration which is that the blue frequencies are broken away earlier followed by green and than
red, like one knows from rainbows. This results in different focus length. It’s called Fraunhofer
bending. Even in small optics the offset is large enough that you will see it and you will have
the problem of getting all three colors sharp at the same time. Since a light source emits all
wavelength at the same time they should reach the detector at the same time and should not
be torn apart by a lens. There are ways to reduce such an effect but this makes lens production
expensive on the one hand and gets other problems in like every optical surface takes light
away.
An other problem is that the sharpness of a lens depends on how smooth the surface is and
here are limits too. One can coat the lens with several materials but has to take into account
that these materials have other effect reducing the quality of the resulting lens.
All this leads to that refractors can be found only at amateurs since building them is limited
in size and by money.

Reflectors
Building mirrors is not that difficult compared to building lenses. One just has to take two disk
the same size buts corundum and water in between and starts grinding. This can be done be
hand for smaller mirror or is done be machines when it comes to certain sizes or quality levels.
Concave or convex curvature to the same as with lenses, where the curvature defines the focal
length. By combining several mirrors one can alter the focal length and fold the optical path
to reduce the building length of the telescope, make it lighter and more compact to make it
transportable. It reduces weight too. One can’t do that with lenses, too. Telescopes made of
mirrors don’t lack chromatic aberration, the are color neutral.
Plenty of combinations where tried through the past centuries leading to Newton’s, Cassegrain’s,
Kutter’s, Yolo’s or combinations with lenses to improve the quality or reach fixed positions of
the drawtube to eye pieces or detectors.
Kutter’s and Yolo’s belong to a class of obstruction free telescopes, where Newton’s and
Cassegrain’s have their second mirror within the optical axis covering a part of the main mirror
and producing some problems.
A Newton telescope, invented by Isaac Newton himself, uses a spherical main mirror with ab
diagonal plane mirror mounted on the optical axis 2/3 of the focal length above regulating the
diameter of the light beam reflected to the detector.
A Cassegrain has a hole in the middle of the main mirror with the second mirror above that

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hole reflecting the light beam through it. This configuration leads to long focal length with
very short distances between both mirrors.
At Kutter telescopes, the second mirror is place of axis at the side to not cover any of the main
mirror, reflecting the beam to the drawtube. The optical path is a zick zack.
Yolo’s fold their optical path in a more complex way to achieve the same obstruction freeness.
Here, both the main and second mirror are on the same axis but are tilted so the light beam
crosses it self but no mirror covers the other.
All these configuration have their advantages and disadvantages. Mirrors have limitations, too.
The two biggest problems are astigmatism and coma.

Astigmatism With astigmatism objects out of the optical axis are shown unsharp. This is
due to crooked light beams being broken away differently producing a fuzzy image.

Coma Coma, derived from the Latin word for hair, comes to existence when two aberrations
overlay from crooked light beams out of the optical axis. So to speak two aberrations of
astigmatism. This produces a hairy image of an object.

Correctors
Aberrations like astigmatism and coma can be reduced or opt out by correctors or by special
designs like Kutter or Yolo (to a certain degree). Coma correctors have to be placed very
carefully to get the result one is looking for. Yolo’s reduce such aberrations by deforming
the mirrors prior grinding or afterwards be deforming the mirrors through their mirror cell
mechanically.
Newton’s and Cassegrain’s can get Schmidt or Maktsutov plates to correct astigmatism. These
are plates put on the telescopes on top before the secondary mirror. The difference between
Schmidt and Maktsutov plates are the surface curvatures. Schmidt plates have one plane side
and the other formed like a mexican hat. Maksutov plates are menikus lenses which correct
both the astigmatism and coma at the same time. There are drawback to that too, but it’s
better to take this drawbacks that having to cope with coma and astigmatism.

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Detectors - Cameras
Additions → What to leave out...

Data Reduction - ... and why!

... and why?
Methods
Software
Pros
Amateurs
vs.

Conclusions
Resources
References
[1] T. Caneva, T. Calarco, S. Montangero, Phys. Rev. A, 84:022326 (2011).
[2] D. Hallwood, T. Ernst, and J. Brand, Phys. Rev. A, 82:063623 (2010).

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