Data Analysis in Astronomy and Physics

General

This course is taught by professor Joris De Ridder, aided by a TA, and exists since the year 2020-2021. It is a fairly regular course with a lecture every week and intermittent exercise sessions/homework assignments. None of these are mandatory, but the exam is very similar to what you'll do in the exercises and assignments, so it is highly recommended that you pour enough effort into properly understanding them.

Throughout this course, you'll use Jupyter Notebooks which use the Python computer language. If you do not yet know Python but do know some other language, you will probably learn it very quickly. However, those with no programming experience whatsoever will likely struggle.

All grades are awarded based on a take home exam and the subsequent the oral exam. The exam consists of six or so exercises where you will usually need to figure out the best approach to the problem by yourself. You'll also need to include conclusions and discussions about you approach and results. Make sure to always add those! During the oral exam, you will essentially have to defend your work by explaining why you used certain techniques and what you could have done differently. Other typical questions include 'do you think this result is realistic' or 'could you explain this technique you employed in more detail'. The professor also regularly asks you to explain concepts from the course that were not brought up in your take home exam. This often takes the form of 'do you remember what this word means?'. He does not demand very in depth and rigorous answers, but do make sure you properly understand all the basics.