Syllabus for Astronomy

Professor: Ken Koehler
Office: Muntz 372
Office Hours: MWF 10:30-11, MW 2:30-3, M 5:30-6 and by appt.
Telephone: 745-5782
E-mail: koehlekr@ucrwcu.rwc.uc.edu

Course Goals

This is a year-long course in Astronomy. Our goals are:

To understand how we know what we know about the universe.

To comprehend astronomical distances.
To understand how the appearance of the universe is related to its 3 dimensional structure.
To understand modern observational technologies across the electromagnetic spectrum.
To interpret visual cues in terms of planetary structure and history.
To use Kepler's and Newton's Laws to compute orbital and planetary characteristics.

To use spectra to determine stellar characteristics.
To understand absolute and apparent magnitude, and be able to assign spectral and luminosity classes to stars based on their spectra.
To understand the life cycles of stars in terms of the nuclear processes that power them.
To understand the end results of stellar evolution.

To understand statistical populations of stars.
To recognize and be able to assign galaxies to morphological classes.
To understand the Hubble relation and its use in computing astronomical distances.
To understand galactic rotation curves and the dark matter hypothesis.
To understand how cosmological parameters are reflected in observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

This course fulfills the General Education Breadth of Knowledge (BoK) area of Natural Science.

Prerequisites

Intermediate Algebra (or its equivalent)

You must have access to a web browser with Java capability. If you do not have it, you may obtain the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from java.sun.com (page down to find the button on the right side labeled "Get Java Software").

You must also have a browser that can display the Greek letters that we use in astronomy to denote some variables. If the following letter:

l

looks like the letter "l", you may need to install a newer version of your browser, or use a different browser.

Text

One of the following texts is required reading for this course:

Astronomy Today (sixth edition), by Chaisson and McMillan

NASA's Remote Sensing Tutorial

In addition, the following course notes will be used heavily in class and for portfolio assignments:

Stars

References

The notes and supporting material are available in three folders stored in this zip file (6/27/08, 70 MB). The tidal time lapse animated slide show files, which are very large and largely redundant, have been omitted to save space.

Electronic Communications Policy

Because of e-mail instabilities, all assignments must be turned in on paper.

Attendance Policy

Failure to attend class will result in the following:

0 to 10% of class meetings missed: no grade reduction
11 to 20% of class meetings missed: final grade is reduced by one letter grade
21 to 30% of class meetings missed: final grade is reduced by two letter grades
more than 30% of class meetings missed: final grade is an F

Attendance will be taken at the start of each class period. If you are not present when it is taken, it counts as a missed class.

Schedule

There are 6 portfolio exercises each quarter (described in the course notes), tentatively due in weeks 4 through 9. Your final portfolio submission will be due at the beginning of exam week. It will include corrected versions of all six portfolio assignments, and a 1-2 page paper discussing the relationships between the results of the exercises in the context of the material covered thus far.

All references must be from texts or .gov web sites; .edu and .org sites must be approved in advance. WIKIs are not allowed.

Grades

Each portfolio exercise will be evaluated when it is turned in, and you will be able to correct it before submitting the final portfolio. The final portfolio will consist of the 6 corrected exercises, and the paper, and each of the seven portfolio constituents will be evaluated on the following scale:

2 - correct and complete
1 - incomplete or contains minor errors
0 - incorrect, irrelevant or missing

Course grades will be assigned on the following scale:

12 to 14 points = an A
10 to 11 points = a B
8 to 9 points = a C
6 to 7 points = A D
0 to 5 points = an F

Plus or minus grades will not be given.