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Research Councils UK - UKRI
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ESA Gaia Mission - Introductory activities
The Gaia spacecraft is a European Space Agency mission to map one billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
‘Introductory Activity – Hubble expansion’ – Students use spreadsheets and sample data from historical supernovae to produce lightcurves and calculate the distances to the supernovae, leading to a measurement of the expansion of the Universe.
‘Photometry with SalsaJ’ – this introduces the students to the SalsaJ software package and how to choose a suitable size aperture for carrying out photometry on supernovae.
‘Photometry of Supernovae with SalsaJ – Gaia16agf’ document – this uses sample image data and SalsaJ to create the lightcurve of a supernova discovered by the ESA Gaia mission.
There are screen casts referenced in the teacher guide which walk through some of the steps involved when using the software.
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Introductory Activity - Hubble expansion 396.72 KB
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Photometry with SalsaJ 558.34 KB
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Type la Supernovae Data 14.91 KB
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Observation Information Gaia 16 agf 11.08 KB
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Data -Gaia agf 10.76 MB
Show downloads
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Introductory Activity - Hubble expansion 396.72 KB -
Photometry with SalsaJ 558.34 KB
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Type la Supernovae Data 14.91 KB
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Observation Information Gaia 16 agf 11.08 KB
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Data -Gaia agf 10.76 MB
Download all files as a .zip12.27 MB
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