Stuff Michael wants to share with the world

Michael Richmond: Dept. of Physics
                  Rochester Institute of Technology
                  85 Lomb Memorial Drive 
                  Rochester, NY 14623-5603
                  (585) 475-2538 (voice)
                  (585) 475-5988 (FAX)
                  mwrsps@rit.edu

What the heck does your .sig quotation mean?

• I teach courses in the Physics Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology. During the Spring Quarter 2008-2009, I'll be teaching
  • Physics 312: University Physics II
  • Physics 374: Experiments in Modern Physics (co-teaching with Professor Barton)

• Published material
  • Local versions of a few papers
  • look it all up via ADS

• Some analysis of occultations by asteroids and the Moon
• My curriculum vitae in postscript or PDF
• My dissertation: The Supernova Rate in Starburst Galaxies
• Some useful Physics resources I've found.
• The Rochester Astrophysics Consortium runs a number of programs and activities in the Rochester area
• The RIT Observatory
  • During the summer of 2001, we observed the heck out of WZ Sge!
• When I need a break or a pick-me-up, I head to Java Wally's @ RIT Library.
• The Amateur Sky Survey (TASS)
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), of which I'm a Participant
  For a few years (1994 - 1997), I kept watch on the weather at Apache Point, New Mexico, where the SDSS telescopes are located.
  • Nightly record of weather and number of hours the ARC 3.5m telescope worked
  • Short annual summary of the weather statistics
• Answers to a few Astronomical Questions
• Thinking of a Career in Astronomy?
• Information on Supernovae
• Optical images of the Crab Pulsar
• My experiences with astronomical photography
• Free Astronomical Software
• Bohdan Paczynski's favorite optical surveys
• Stars in the Rochester sky , thanks to wunderground.com.
• Other astronomical WWW sites
• Some analysis of major league baseball

Published material

Guiding A brief look at some of the issues involved in designing a guide camera, with examples for small telescopes. This appeared in the proceedings of the Orange County Astronomers' third annual meeting, titled Proc. Electronics Oriented Astronomy Seminar 3..

BAIT, which stands for Berkeley Automatic Imaging Telescope. This paper was published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, vol. 105, page 1164 (1993), and is copyrighted by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Putting together the BAIT software (Dick Treffers put together the hardware) occupied much of my time at Berkeley. I included an Appendix in my thesis on BAIT.

Dick has put together a nice collection of BAIT-related material. BAIT has recently been turned into KAIT, the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope. This new instrument is installed at Lick Observatory, and has started regular observations as of spring 1997. It discovered the Type II Supernova 1997bs on April 14, 1997. Find out more about KAIT at the KAIT home page. The SlugVideo Camera atop Mount Umuhhum shows a real-time picture of Mount Hamilton, home of Lick Observatory, so that you can check the weather.

SN 1993J photometry paper on the enigmatic, but nearby, SN in M81. Reprinted from the Astronomical Journal, vol 107, pages 1022-1040, 1994; copyrighted by the American Astronomical Society and used by permission.

SN 1994D A paper presenting UBVRI photometry of the type Ia SN 1994D in NGC 4526. Reprinted from the Astronomical Journal, vol 109, pages 2121-2133, 1995; copyrighted by the American Astronomical Society and used by permission.

SN 1994I A paper presenting UBVRI photometry of the type Ic SN 1994I in M51. Reprinted from the Astronomical Journal, vol 111, pages 327-339, 1996; copyrighted by the American Astronomical Society and used by permission.

Later evolution of SN 1993J presents multiband photometry of SN 1993J from 3 to 365 days after its discovery (extending coverage beyond the 120-day limit in the earlier paper. Reprinted from the Astronomical Journal, vol. 112, page 732, 1996; copyrighted by the American Astronomical Society and used by permission.

Near Earth Objects: A brief review and a student project by Smallwood, Katz and Richmond (published in American Journal of Physics, vol 72, p 264 (2004) , describes NEOs, goes through the mathematics of deriving parallax to one via simultaneous measurements, and then provides two examples.

My dissertation

You may also read a short version, published in the May 1998 issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP 110, 747, 1998). This Postscript version of the paper The Supernova Rate in Starburst Galaxies, by Richmond, Filippenko and Galisky, is about 2.8 MByte. It includes tables and figures.

Information on Supernovae (SNe)

Supernovae now (Feb 7, 1998) get their own WWW page. But they deserve it.

Free Astronomical Software

I have written some software that you might find useful. Please help yourself -- it's free, but I'd appreciate it if you'd keep attributions.

• Rice compression of 16-bit integer FITS images
• Matching lists of stars
• Perform inhomogeneous ensemble photometry
• A pipeline for reducing astronomical CCD images (designed specifically for TASS Mark IV data)
• XVista: an astronomical image-processing suite
• Convert Lynxx CCD to 16-bit data file. This program converts a raw Lynxx CCD image, which uses 3 bytes to store 2 pixel values, into a binary file which stores each pixel value in a 16-bit unsigned integer. You can use the "convert" program in the XVista suite to then convert the 16-bit-per-pixel binary file into FITS. This program works under Linux with an Intel CPU.
• On-line CCD signal-to-noise calculator

Nice Non-Astronomical Software

I have found these items useful -- perhaps you will, too.

• A site with links which can generate graph paper.