Abstract
Our usual aim is to measure the brightness of an astronomical object – the amount of energy per second arriving at the Earth from that object, usually in the form of light waves but sometimes in the form of particles or of gravitational waves. The arriving light could be characterised in several ways – its time of arrival, its arrival direction, the frequency of the light, and its polarisation state. More generally, we might measure the brightness of light in various different directions, thus making a map of the sky brightness; or we might measure how the brightness of the light from an object is distributed in frequency, thus measuring the spectrum of that object.
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Lawrence, A. (2014). Signal, Distortion, and Noise. In: Astronomical Measurement. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39835-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39835-3_1
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