Professor: Jerome A. Orosz
Textbook: The Essential Cosmic Perspective , Seventh Edition, by Jeffrey Bennett, Megan Donahue, Nicholas Schneider, and Mark Voit.
Click here for the syllabus. Click here for a PDF version.
The class notes will be posted on BlackBoard after each class.
The homework will be assigned periodically during class.
Here are some useful Astronomy links for learning specific introductory concepts:
A JAVA applet for plotting blackbody curves. Needs a JAVA-enabled browser.
Kepler's Laws animation. Also, try out the tool for demonstrating epicycles.
Build a scale model of the Solar System.
JAVA applets from the University of British Columbia demonstrating the 1/r^2 law, the Doppler effect, parallax, and black body radiation.
Spectral types of stars from The University of Manchester.
Orbits in strong gravitational fields.
The Solar System Simulator from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Black Holes with JAVA by Peter Musgrave.
On-line Astronomy notes and resources:
Windows to the Universe from the University of Michigan.
Nick Strobel's Astronomy Notes.
From the University of Tennessee: Astronomy 161, The Solar System, and Astronomy 162, Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology.
Astronomy pictures links:
The Astronomy picture of the day.
NASA pages, including the "the Hubble Site", the Hubble Space Telescope "Hubble Heritage Project", and the Space Science Image Gallary.
Pictures from the European Southern Observatory.
Links related to pseudoscience:
Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" page, discussing common misconceptions, shooting down conspiracy theories, etc.
Professor Welsh's page from ASTRO 310.
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