Questions tagged [data-analysis]
Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making.
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Why does it take so long to transmit an image from New Horizons to Earth?
I just got the news that the New Horizons space probe has passed by some remote planet on the edge of the solar system.
I was surprised that the guy from NASA says that it might take 24 months from ...
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What is the "lost light" in this unusual Hubble Deep Sky image?
The Daily Galaxy article “The Lost Hubble” –New! Deepest Image of the Universe Ever Taken says:
To produce the image a group of researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) led ...
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Where can I find a catalog of all stars in the Milky Way?
Is there a catalog of all known stars or brightest stars in our galaxy? Preferably with some sort of galactic coordinates instead of just night sky coordinates (right ascension, etc.) I'm trying to ...
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Where might a semi proficient amateur analyst participate in meaningful astronomical efforts
I am a retired engineer that has an ongoing interest in space efforts. In my youth I did work on the Apollo program but on propulsion and vehicle thermal control: not flight dynamics.
I have ...
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How to determine scalar-to-tensor ratio r from CMB polarization spectrum?
CMB polarization spectrum can tell us about the primordial scalar and tensor perturbation. By analyze B and E mode angular spectrum power spectrum and temperature power spectrum we can determine the ...
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What 1° x 1° region is the optically darkest patch in the sky?
What 1° x 1° region of the night sky has the lowest flux of light?
(considering the typical visual/luminance filter range, approximations using other filters/bands are acceptable, but should be in the ...
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How do you propagate asymmetric errors? (on the practical way to...)
I've used uncertainties's ufloatpackage to propagate uncertainties as I thought it's the standard way to do it. Now I want to ...
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How did asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 get its "face"? Is it reconstructed from optical or radar imaging, or something else?
(Image sources linked below)
NPR's March 10, 2023 Newly found asteroid has a 'very small chance' of hitting Earth, NASA says includes an image of what looks like a computer reconstructed 3D surface of ...
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Does the cosmic microwave background change over time?
Does the cosmic microwave background pattern change over time? I would assume it is getting "cooler" as in more redshifted as time passes, but I am more interested if the pattern on the background, ...
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How has the resolution of astronomical spectrographs improved over time?
Is there something like a Moore's law for spectral resolution? Maybe a chart from which one could extrapolate?
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Milky Way position on the sky
I'm looking for some sort of boundary data to be able to render the milky way on a star map, as visible from Earth. Something that looks like this:
For that, I need something like a collection of RA ...
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If I can't unscramble an egg, how do Astronomers unscramble views gravitationally lensed by complex mass distributions?
Quanta Magazine's Two Weeks In, the Webb Space Telescope Is Reshaping Astronomy highlights two submissions to arXiv soon after the first images were released: "Three days later, just minutes ...
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What is the most common activity of astronomers in the JWST? [closed]
I am no astronomer. I am a computer scientist.
I recently read this article: JWST has changed the speed of discovery, for better or for worse - Astronomers are working at a furious pace to analyze and ...
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Can automatic algorithms completely eliminate the impact of Starlink and other satellites?
According to a comment by user @J:
With that said, other than aesthetics, machine vision algorithms are wildly more advanced today than in the past - strategies to remove passing satellites don't ...
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Role of power laws in astronomy?
I often see astronomers fitting data to power laws. What about power laws makes them so useful in astronomy? Why are so many astronomical observations well-fit by power laws? I know it's a relation ...
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What is sin i in this graph and why is it there?
This is some data presented in a lecture on exoplanets that depicts the distribution of the sizes of super-Earths in comparison to the mass of Jupiter. I would like to know what the argument of the ...
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Acquirable Raw Data in Amateur Astrophotography
What raw data can I possibly acquire from an 8" Classical Dobsonian Telescope, and a DSLR? Could anything eye-opening to amateur astronomers be computed or calculated first-hand with such equipment? I'...
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What are the analysis steps in taking raw data from Kepler to a planetary system determination
I wish to get a concise list of the analysis steps required to take raw light data from a Kepler data set of a star through the steps needed to get to an analytical determination of the existence of a ...
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What's a good example of published astronomy pipeline coding libraries
I am a software engineer and I am preparing a presentation to aspiring astronomy PhDs on how to use best-practice software engineering when publishing code (such as include documentation, modular ...
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How do I get started in astronomy data analysis?
I am learning some machine learning (I have previous background in statistics) on my own, and I am interested in getting some hands-on practice by doing some ML analysis in R and Python.
Given how ...
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Are there any astronomical phenomena that could emit strong radio waves with multiples of a discrete frequency?
In the New Scientist article Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space, it is reported that several times since 2001, astronomers have detected fast radio bursts that seem to have a ...
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DAMIT how do they get 3D shape and rotational trajectory of a tumbling asteroid from photometry?
This question asks about an algorithm used in Project DAMIT.
@RobJeffries' answer led me to Wikipedia's William Herschel Telescope which led me to Wikipedia's 2008 TC3 which led me to the animation ...
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How open is China in sharing data from the Chang'e 4 mission?
It's really good to see that man (well, machine) has gone back to the moon again.
Chang'e 4 is studying potential mantle material from the lunar depths and will be conducting radio astronomy in ...
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Astronomical databases for machine learning?
I was reading this question about open problems in astronomy. The bounty-receiving answer says that
I have just left the field where some colleagues are trying to develop some software to use ...
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How does radio bandwidth restrict the choice and use of science payload on interplanetary probes?
I asked a question here about returning to Earth a physical memory capsule along with soil samples, as a complement to radio operations as today. This might return a much larger amount of data ...
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On what basis is the information about the distance and velocity of the Voyager probes determined?
Voyager 1 was the first-ever object to reach interstellar space on
August 25, 2012 when it passed beyond the sun’s realm of plasma
influence (the heliosphere)[...]
(source)
Although some of their ...
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Why do we use FITS format for scientific images especially in astronomy? How is it different from formats such as JPEG, PNG etc?
I am new to astronomy and I found that the telescopic dataset can be stored in the FITS format instead of JPEG. Why do we have a special image format just for scientific images?
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Are astronomical studies with no "proprietary period" for data organized differently than studies with "proprietary period"?"
Let's assume you are a group of astronomers that proposed an observation by a telescope.
The observation has been conducted, so you have got the data you wanted. But the data has no proprietary period....
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Locate stars in sky from list of (x, y) co-ordinates
Imagine we have a photographic plate that clearly shows a few stars, but we do not know where in the sky these stars are located.
We can digitize the location of stars on this plate and now have a set ...
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What are the present, and potentially the future roles of data scientists in Astronomy? [closed]
I am a data scientist and curious about their roles in modern Astronomy, both now, and in the near future. What are type of roles and projects where data scientist are most active in Astronomy? What ...
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What does the active area on a typical CCD based detector look like?
Pixel based detectors, particularly optical CCDs like what was used in the SDSS camera, are ubiquitous in astronomy. Is there any dead area on the detectors? Not the obvious gaps between each ...
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Could an hypothetical hidden black hole companion to the sun be revealed by proper motion data?
If the Sun were in a binary star system with a black hole companion, the Sun would be orbiting the black hole, and this should be reflected in a change in the observed proper motion of nearby stars.
...
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Will there be public access to the New Horizons data from Ultima Thule?
I imagine New Horizons data from its encounter with Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) has started arriving.
Does anyone know if this data is public?
And, if so, how you can access it?
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How to search SIMBAD using identifiers?
I'm trying to get some data about the moon from SIMBAD (specifically, radiation spectrum in certain wavelengths), and I encountered an unexpected problem: I can't find the Moon.
In SIMBAD, I can ...
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How could a Dyson Swarm be detected?
My understanding is that a completed Dyson Sphere would be detectable because we would see a star that seemed to produce only infra-red light, and much less than would be expected from an object of ...
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Conventional units for astronomical object coordinates
I would like to know what the conventional units for identifying a celestial object (J2000.0) are. For instance, I am reading a paper in which they refer to object SDSSJ170013.70+400855.6; I am ...
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How to Determine Absolute Magnitude of a Galaxy using HST FITS Image
I'm attempting my first serious research project but due to... various circumstances, I am going to mostly be solving problems like this on my own with minimal outside help.
As for the actual problem, ...
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Unbelievably high masses/ densities in NASA website data
In May, I did my own amateur analysis of Kepler data that was supplied here. This was a table of all confirmed "Kepler planets" to date (April 1, 2015). This table had some unbelievably high masses/...
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Other than Lomb-Scargle Periodograms and String Length Minimization, what other methods can be used to find the period of unevenly spaced data?
I'm doing some research into how different methods of finding the period with unevenly spaced data compare with each other. So far, I've looked at the Lomb-Scargle and String-Length Minimization. I ...
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Deriving Dark Matter; specifically looking for a table of stellar speed versus distance from center of galaxy to derive dark matter
I'm trying to find some data that I can use to derive dark matter (in a loosey-goosey sort of way, I won't be too rigorous). I'm helping a friend out with a final project for his astronomy course and ...
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Why Nyquist Sampling Rate depends on Bandwidth and not max frequency?
Is the Nyquist sampling rate same for different bands if those bands have same bandwith? E.g. Would the Nyquist Sampling rate be same for 1000-1400 MHz band as for 100-500 MHz band because both the ...
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How does the Hubble Space Telescope measure the speed of the wind inside Jupiter's Great Red Spot?
Space.com's Jupiter's winds of change show increased storm speeds in Great Red Spot and Hubblesite.org's Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter's Great Red Spot are Speeding Up both link to the recent open ...
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Adjust axis labels in ds9
How can I adjust the axis labels in ds9?
I'd like to have something like:
So far I only managed to get floating points (tl h%f3):
or the leading hours are missing (tl h%f1 m):
Edit:
I tried "tlhm....
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Is there a database of all known star names/identifiers?
I am looking for a list of all known identifiers used for stars. I'm not sure on the terminology. While I do want the "proper names", I also want whatever identifier is used for each star detected, ...
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How to extract galaxy spectra for different radii in Python for spectra taken by long slit spectrograph?
I am trying to extract the kinematics from the elliptical galaxy NGC 4697 using the Fourier Correlation Quotient (FCQ) algorithm described by Bender (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1990A%26A...229.....
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What caused instant jumps and exactly flat periods in Kepler's light curves?
Last 65 days of Kepler's light curve for the infamous KIC 8462852 star is shown below from the published paper's graph. Skip the dips here, I wonder about two other features:
Day 1559, during a ...
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Planets and moons positions in cartesian coordinates?
Is there freely available and reliable source, where one can find positions of planets and moons of the Solar system at given time in cartesian coordinates? (I am writing a simple gravity simulator ...
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Acronyms of catalogs in SIMBAD database
How to find acronym of specific catalog in SIMBAD database? For example, I want to select
stellar names, object types and all binary stars from "Stellar effective magnetic fields. II." catalog (...
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How do you tell if a variable star is periodic or not by its light curve?
I have light curves for a particular star. I'm able to construct a periodogram of the stars' light curve, a plot of the power of the light curve vs. the signal's period. For a nonperiodic but ...
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How did astronomers "measure a large (>40 degrees) misalignment between the black hole spin and the orbital spin" of MAXI J1820+70?
Gizmodo's Funky Black Hole Is Spinning Tilted says:
A team of astronomers recently observed an askew black hole just 10,000 light-years from Earth. The black hole’s spin axis is out of alignment with ...
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