Hello all, As you know, you will each write a final paper due on Dean's Date. You should each choose a topic and write a few paragraphs describing what you will cover; hand this in by Tuesday, November 11 (the week after Fall break). I will give you feedback on your choice, and suggestions of specific resources to use and topics to focus on. And of course, I would be happy to discuss your topic with you beforehand. The following list should give you some sense of what appropriate topics might be. There's a lot of acronyms here; a bit of googling will allow you to figure out what some of these missions are. Please do not feel restricted to this list. Moreover, some of these topics are very broad, and it may be more appropriate to focus on a specific issue within each of these topics. -Michael *********** Observatories and observational techniques The Physics of Astronomical Seeing Heterodyne vs. Bolometric Receivers Phased Array Antennas The plans for the Square Kilometer Array Mileura Array or other probes of high-redshift 21-cm emission LOFAR Extended VLA ALMA The operation and science of the VLBA Making radio maps Comparing radio dish design: Green Bank vs. Arecibo Astrometry with radio telescopes Cosmic Microwave Background experiments: Interferometers versus Single Dish Balloon-borne experiments Ground-based vs. space-based missions WMAP operations Atacama Cosmology Telescope South Pole Telescope How Planck works Measuring CMB Polarization Measuring and correcting for foregrounds Millimeter and submillimeter facilities: Technology, Sites, and beating the atmosphere CCAT The instrumentation on the Spitzer Space Telescope (or focus on a single of its instruments) The instrumentation on the Hubble Space Telescope (or focus on a single of its instruments) The plans for the James Webb Space Telescope (or focus on a single instrument) Sky backgrounds in the optical and ultraviolet in the infrared in the millimeter Present and future infrared missions: Spitzer ASTRO-F WISE Herschel How data is transferred from space telescopes to the ground Doing astronomy from the moon Modern large optical telescope design Plans for 30-meter-class telescopes: GMT TMT ELT The design of high-resolution echelle spectrographs Measuring the Sun from the Sun and from space: GONG ATST/DKIST SOHO TRACE Measuring radial velocities of stars to accuracies of meters/second Optical aberrations and their control Extreme high-contrast imaging and coronagraphs Active optics Adaptive optics Planetary searches from Space: The Kepler mission TESS Terrestrial Planet Finder and Darwin High-resolution X-ray imaging; how X-rays are focussed Coded masks and imaging gamma rays Ground-based Cerenkov Cosmic ray detectors: Fly's Eye Auger AMANDA High Energy X-ray and Gamma Ray Experiments Chandra XMM Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory INTEGRAL HESS GLAST/FERMI NuSTAR Detecting gravitational waves: Binary pulsars LIGO LISA Detecting dark matter particles Detecting neutrinos Kamiokande ICECUBE Accurate measurements of time in astronomy Modeling diffuse emission from the Milky Way: In the optical In the infrared In the gamma-rays In the radio Detecting polarized light in astronomy In the optical In the radio Comparing CCD and CMOS detectors for optical astronomy Building large detector arrays: In the optical (CCDs) In the near-infrared In the millimeter The manufacture of large telescopes: segmented versus meniscus mirrors Current and next generation of wide-field optical imaging surveys: SDSS Pan-STARRS LSST Dark Energy Survey Subaru and HSC WFIRST Euclid Next generation of wide-field spectroscopic surveys SDSS-IV HETDEX BigBOSS/DESI PFS 4MOST ngCFHT/MSE MOONS Integral-field spectroscopy Scattering of light in the atmosphere, from rainbows to sunsets ************Statistical and numerical techniques Markov Processes; Markov Chain Monte Carlo for mapping likelihood functions Simulated Annealing: how it really works Techniques for non-linear chi^2 minimization, e.g., Levenberg- Marquardt Non-parametric and rank statistics Techniques for measuring periodicity in data Matched Filters Data compression, both lossy and lossless Advanced techniques for numerical integration The inversion of really big matrices Principal Component Analysis and the Karhunen-Loeve Transform Singular Value Decomposition Fast Fourier Transforms Wavelet Transforms Spline fits to curves Fitting a line when you have errors in both x and y Techniques for the N-body gravitational problem Direct integration and the GRAPE machine Particle-Mesh Particle-Particle-Particle-Mesh Adaptive Mesh Putting in gas physics: Eulerian and Lagrangian schemes Chaos and stability in the solar system Numerical radiative transfer Numerical models for stellar structure and evolution Numerical hydrodynamics Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics Magnetohydrodynamics