INTRODUCTION TO ASTRONOMY

Astronomy 301

There is also an addendum to this syllabus.

CLASSROOM:Welch Hall 3.502
PROFESSOR:John Scalo
 Office:R.L. Moore 17.220
 Phone:471-6446 (office), or 478-2748 (home)
 E-Mail:parrot@astro.as.utexas.edu
 Office Hours:Monday afternoons, 1:00-3:00, or by appointment. However I urge you to feel free to call me at my home or office, or to talk to me after class (outside the classroom, if necessary); for short questions there is usually no need for you to walk all the way to my office.
TEACHING ASSISTANT: Diek Wheeler
 Office:R.L. Moore 7.318
 Phone:471-7253 (ask for his office)
 E-Mail:diek@cs.utexas.edu
 Office hours:TW 2:00-4:00

TEXTBOOK:

Chaisson, E. and McMillan, S. Astronomy Today, 1997 Media Edition. It is important that you purchase the "Media Edition" that includes a CD-ROM.

GRADING:

Exams: 80% of your grade will be based on four exams (see below for approximate dates), all of which will be weighted equally. There will be no comprehensive final. The exams will consist entirely of multiple choice questions. I will try to prepare you for the nature of the exam questions by occasionally giving sample questions during lectures, by trying to point out the types of information that I expect you to understand or remember, and by assigning homework that emphasizes the concepts most important for the exam. There is an excellent interactive self-testing part of the CD-ROM accompanying the text that I urge you to use.

Homework: 20% of your grade will be based on four to six homework assignments, which will consist of a mixture of short answer (< 2 or so sentences) and multiple choice questions. The purposes of the homework is to give you a way of testing your understanding of the material, to provide a guide to the most important concepts, and to force you to keep up with the material.

Final grades are usually assigned on the basis of A = 90-100, B = 80-89.9, etc., although I may end up making some of these cutoffs a little lower (never higher) at the time final grades are assigned.

DESCRIPTION:

This course is meant as a descriptive introduction to a wide range of topics in astronomy for students who are not science or math majors. The emphasis in this course is on description of astronomical phenomena, how astronomical observations can be interpreted, and physical theories for the evolution of various types of astronomical objects. Concerning the mathematical level, it is minimal in this course. Students will rarely be required to manipulate equations as part of the homework or exams. However, you will encounter a few important but simple formulas in the text whose understanding will be helpful. You should also get used to seeing very large and very small numbers expressed in "scientific notation" (covered in Chapter 1). Another thing that will be very helpful is to develop a comfort with looking at graphs, if you're not already. Comfort with scientific notation and graphs will greatly enhance the ease with which you comprehend concepts later in the course, and so I urge you to spend some time on these matters early in the course. However, most of the emphasis in this class will be focussed on a verbal-level presentation and understanding of the material.

The lectures will generally emphasize the most important and/or difficult topics covered in the text and attempt to clarify their connections. The lectures will not cover every topic covered in the text that you are responsible for, so don't assume that if it's not covered in lecture, it won't be on the exam, although I will often tell you during the lectures which parts of the text you can skip or are of minor interest. Similarly, there are a few subjects to which I will add material not covered in the text. So you may find it a distinct advantage to attend classes regularly.

Your textbook has a number of features worth noting, which I will remind you of as the course proceeds. I chose this text partly because of its outstanding visual displays, which I am hopeful will clarify the text and lectures. Of particular note are the use of "zoom-in" photos and diagrams and the "spectrum icon" labels under all the photographs, which you will see if you leaf through the book.

The CD-ROM accompanying the book contains a LOT of material, including the whole textbook, with links to updates on developments that have happened since this edition was published; links between figures and topics in the text and 27 animations; hyperlinks between all cross-links, glossary terms, and learning objectives; and interactive self-scoring end-of-chapter tests. I will NOT hold you directly responsible for any of the material on the CD-ROM that is not in the text, EXCEPT for the interactive multiple-choice questions, which I think are of high quality and should be a very useful guide to the types of questions you will encounter on the exam. The rest of the CD-ROM material can be perused at your discretion. It should be emphasized, however, that you might find your understanding of the material strongly enhanced by, say, looking at pictures and animations on the CD-ROM, so I want to encourage you to at least dabble in the CD-ROM as we cover each new topic.

Similarly, there is a World Wide Web site organized around the chapters and updated monthly ( http://www.prenhall.com/~chaisson/), that includes audio and animation clips, a collection of links to astronomy resources, and additional questions and exercises. Use of this site is entirely optional, and I will not assume that you have examined the site at all. However, you may find the additional sample questions of interest in reviewing and self-testing.

In general, I am hoping that your performance in and enjoyment of this class should not depend significantly on whether or not you have easy access to a computer. But I also want to allow all of you access to the additional features that are available through your textbook using a computer, if you wish to use them. So if you don't have access to a computer (your own or a friend's), obtain a university computer account and learn to use the facilities at the Student Microcomputing Facility in the Undergraduate Library (UGL) as soon as possible if you haven't already.

Because of the large number of topics included in "astronomy" and the finite length of the semester, I have decided to omit several chapters that consist of detailed discussions of objects in our solar system (Chapters 7-14) and to not discuss the history of astronomy, except in ways that I will make clear in class.

We need to first develop the background physical principles that will be used to understand observations and theories. This might be the most crucial part of the course, because it may seem dry and difficult, but much of your later success in understanding the material will depend on how comfortable you are with these basic physical concepts. So probably the most important advice for this course is to NOT get behind in the reading and self-testing for the first part of the course, especially Chapters 3 and 4 on the topic of light.

Here is a list of the reading assignments and the approximate date on which each of the four exams will take place. Because of uncertainties in the timing of the course, you should consider these exam dates as tentative, plus-or-minus one class meeting. Definite exam dates will always be announced sufficiently before each exam that this present uncertainty should cause no problems.

Part I Chapters 1 (basics), 2 (gravity, orbits, ...), 3 (radiation), 4 (spectroscopy), 5 (telescopes), 6 (survey of the solar system), and 15 (formation of the solar system) [Note that we are skipping Chapters 7-14 covering details of the solar system.]
 Exam 1 should occur around Tuesday, September 23.
  
Part II Chapters 16 (the sun), 17 (properties of stars), 18 (the interstellar gas and dust), and 19 (the birth and early evolution of stars)
 Exam 2 should occur around Thursday, October 16.
  
Part III Chapters 20-22 (stellar evolution and death), 23 (Milky Way galaxy) [Note: We may cover Chapter 28 on extraterrestrial intelligence here.]
 Exam 3 should occur around Thurday, November 21.
  
Part IV Chapters 24 (normal galaxies), 25 (peculiar galaxies), 26 (cosmology), 27 (the early universe), and 28 (extraterrestrial intelligence) [Note: We may cover Chapter 28 at the end of part III rather than here, depending on time constraints.]
 Exam 4 will occur on Thursday, December 4 (the last class meeting).

Please also see the addendum to this syllabus.