AST 301

Introduction to Astronomy

Fall 1998

TTH 9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
WEL 3.502
Unique No. 44895

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Frank Bash
Office: RLM 15.208

TA: Lara Cross
Phone: 471-0445

TEXT

HORIZONS, Exploring the Universe, Michael A. Seeds, Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1998 - 5th Edition

GRADING, EXAMS, AND HOMEWORK

  1. There will be two one-hour exams. Each exam counts 25% of your final grade, and thus exams represent 50% of your final grade.

    One of the hour exams will be given at mid-term and one at the end of the term.

  2. You will be required to answer an approximately bi-weekly question set. Help will be available on the question sets each week in help sessions. Part (b) counts 50% of your final grade. We will give you all the help you need.
  3. Each student in this class will receive a mid-term letter grade computed as above and using the same "curve" as will be used at the end of the semester.

HELP

The TA and I will do everything we can to help you do well in the course. Help will be available outside of class several times every week. We will announce times and places of the help sessions about one week after the class begins. Extra help sessions will be held before exams. Since we will be going over the problems in the homework assignments, we ask you not to be late to the help session if you want to hear a discussion of the first problem in the assignment. Endless repeating of the first problem discussion for the benefit of latecomers bores the students who were on time and drives the instructor crazy.

OBSERVING

If you wish, there is a 9-inch telescope available for observing planets and stars, operated by an astronomy graduate student. It is available to you each clear Friday night 9:00 - 10:00 p.m. and each clear Saturday night 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. If you would like to learn how to operate the telescope so that you can use it by yourself, see me.

LEVEL OF THE COURSE AND OTHER REQUIREMENTS

This is a course for non-science majors. If you are one of these people, you should have no trouble. If you are a math major with several college math and physics courses, you are in the wrong course.

The course introduces students to modern astronomy with a special focus on how stars work. The course uses some mathematics on homework, for which lots of help is available, and no mathematics on exams.

HELP SESSIONS, GENERAL REQUIREMENTS, AND DISCIPLINE

The help sessions are extremely important and very helpful. You are urged to plan to attend at least one of them each week. You may attend as many as you wish. We will work through each assigned problem and go over any problems which students have with the lecture material. Again, I urge you to attend a help session.

We understand that people do their homework together. Nevertheless, we will not accept homework which is a direct copy of another paper. Both papers will get a grade of zero.

Cheating on exams will not be tolerated!

On both exams and homework we require complete answers which include the method you used to get the answer. Answers without an explanation of the method used will get no credit.

I also expect your answers to be expressed in legible, lucid, correctly spelled English sentences. If not, you will have points deducted from your homework score.

Because this class is large we must have your homework papers turned in by the time they are due and in the correct place. Late homework papers or papers left in the wrong place will not be graded. If you ask a friend to turn in your paper, make certain that he/she knows where to leave it. The time each homework set is due will be posted (usually Fridays by 5:00 p.m.).

Turn in your homework in class or leave it in the box, labeled for this class, on the 13th floor of RLM. The turn-in box is the one with a slot in its top near the floor. But there are turn-in boxes for all astronomy classes. Be sure to find the one for our class.