Science with Large Astronomical Surveys

Undergraduate / Graduate

The last several decades have seen a rapid proliferation of novel astronomical survey programs mapping billions of objects across the full sky with extraordinary sensitivity and precision. This course will explore the wide variety of science that can be done with surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Dark Energy Survey, the Gaia satellite, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Science topics will include our Solar System, our Galaxy, the Local Group, distant galaxies, and cosmological measurements of our Universe. We will familiarize ourselves with the hardware and software components of astronomical surveys, before diving into hands-on analysis of public data sets. Students will learn computational and statistical techniques for analyzing large astronomical data sets. This course aims to equip upper-level undergraduate students with the knowledge and tools needed to begin independent research using astronomical survey data.