Can anybody give me some references for original (modern) publications of observational data regarding the 'Aberration of Starlight'? I would be particularly interested in observations obtained in the radio region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

You'll have to time travel back about 300 yrs and ask an English guy named Bradley, I think he found the velocity of the Earth in its orbit made starlight observed from Earth appear to have another velocity added to its own, this was the added velocity as a sideways component, I think people like Fresnel Lorentz and Einstein were to study it also, but James Bradley was the first to find it.

It seems to me that we don't yet have radio telescopes with sufficient resolution to detect the tiny effect of stellar aberration (in the radio freq. range). Could be wrong though; technology could have whizzed right by me when I blinked. :wink:

Gsquare

Edit: I guess I'd better correct myself.....now that I've updated my cranial hard drive.
Apparently aberration corrections are neccesary in VLA's.
See: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bbutler/wor...observing.html

Seriously necessary - the aberration ellipse is about 40 arcseconds on the semimajor axis, which is hundreds of resolution elements for the VLA's highest-resolution modes and tens of thousands o VLBI resolutionelements. The reason people don't mention it unless the fine details are an issue is that the correction is automated in the processing software (such as AIPS). I did find a PDF from someone at USNO pointing out the need to reconcile the algorithmic details between optical and radio observers for best accuracy. The difference in usual treatment came about historically, since radio interferometry sees aberration in its effect on delay between antennae (the cosine component) rather than pointing angle directly (the sine component). This meant that different approximate formulae began to be used, which causes problems now that more precise coordinate transformations are sometimes required.