Learning the Background

astrobites

If you want to keep up with the latest research, a good place to start is astrobites, a grad-student-run collective who do amazingly accessible blog posts about recent astronomy papers. While you get up to speed on astronomy research, it is great to read astrobites to get the gist of the broad sweep of astronomy!

They also have more general guides: to (American!) graduate school, and to astrophyics software.

astrobetter

There is also a great page of astronomy tutorials and general advice at astrobetter, covering everything from software to jobs.

Statistics

We will be using a lot of stats in astronomy!

General Statistics

My favourite textbooks on statistics are

• Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms, by Mackay, free online;
• Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial by Sivia, for which I have a hard copy I can lend you; and
• Bayesian Logical Data Analysis for the Physical Sciences by Gregory, for which I also have a hard copy.

There is a great series of tutorial papers by David Hogg and members of the NYC stats community on stats for astronomy:

• On MCMC: Data analysis recipes: Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Hogg & Foreman-Mackey
• On regularized fitting: Fitting very flexible models: Linear regression with large numbers of parameters, Hogg & Villar
• On Bayesian inference: Data analysis recipes: Fitting a model to data, Hogg, Bovy, & Lang
• On Probability theory: Data analysis recipes: Probability calculus for inference, Hogg

and other papers, like

• A Conceptual Introduction to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Betancourt

Gaussian Processes

• The great textbook by Rasmussen & Williams is freely available as a PDF online.
• Great lecture by Dan Foreman-Mackey: speakerdeck.com/dfm/an-astronomers-introduction-to-gaussian-processes-v2
• Introductory paper by Roberts et al 2012: ADS link

Miscellaneous Astronomy

• Natasha Hurley-Walker's paper on the origin and reasoning behind the Jansky unit.

ADS Libraries

Here are some ADS libraries listing papers directly relevant to our research topics. Probably good to have a look at these!

• Photometry Papers

• Kernel Phase Papers

• Radio Stars and Exoplanets

• Radiocarbon Papers

Also...

• My DPhil thesis!

• If you can read French, Frantz Martinache's Habilitation thesis has great discussion of kernel phase theory.

Astronomy in Australia and The World

Satellites might live in a vacuum - but we certainly don't. Here are some reading materials to help get to grips with the complex relationship between astronomy, politics, culture, and power.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein maintains an excellent Decolonizing Science Reading List, which has a particularly deep engagement with issues about the exploitation of Indigenous people and land for telescopes, such as at the summit of Maunakea in Hawai'i. Prescod-Weinstein's book The Disordered Cosmos is available in the UQ library.

In the Australian context, it is vital to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander science. I strongly recommend the Warwick Thornton documentary We Don't Need A Map, the Ray Norris book Emu Dreaming, and the online resources at aboriginalastronomy.com.au.

For the history of our our astronomical community, I have a collection of hard copy biographies and memoirs of prominent Australian and international astronomers, which you are welcome to borrow: for instance Australian radio astronomy pioneers Ruby Payne-Scott, John Bolton, Jim Peebles, and Carl Sagan.

Astronomy is a very carbon-intensive science and some great work has been done on our climate impacts (which we need to do better at minimizing!). There is an excellent Climate Issue in Nature Astronomy, including especially this article about Australian astronomy's climate impacts (substantially from fossil electricity to run observatories and supercomputing!).