Schedule

The schedule and course requirements may be adjusted as needed to meet our learning objectives.

Aug 22-26

First light

• No class on Monday - schedule conflict.
• Through the Earth's atmosphere [1-12]
• Optical astronomy [13-29]

Aug 29-2

Innovations in instrumentation

• Large telescope design [30-46]
• Ray tracing [Oslo]
• Active/adaptive optics and interferometry [Supplement]

Sep 5-9

Analyzing ``star'' light

• No class on Monday because of Labor Day holiday.
• CCD detectors [47-64]
• Spectrographs [65-76]

Sep 12-16

Observational astronomy

• Hubble Space Telescope and its archives [Supplement]
• X-Rays to Infrared: Spitzer and Chandra [126-145, Supplement]
• Ground-based observatories: KPNO to LSST [Supplement]

Sep 19-23

Cataloging the sky

• Photometry [84-92,182-185]
• Celestial coordinates and reference systems [163-172]
• Time [172-181]

Sep 26-30

Distances and 3-D visualization

• Parallax [358-361]
• Hipparcos and Tycho catalogs [Supplement]
• Partiview [Supplement]

Oct 3-7

Properties of stars

• Stellar spectra [182-198]
• Binary and eclipsing stars [198-211, Supplement]
• Stars in clusters [211-224]

Oct 10-14

Evolving stars

• No class on Monday because of Fall Break.
• Novae and Supernovae [224-235, Supplement]
• First test

Oct 17-21

Stellar structure

• Equilibrium [236-245]
• Energy generation and transport [245-254]
• Structure of main sequence stars [254-260]

Oct 24-28

Stellar evolution

• Models of evolving stars [260-273]
• White dwarf stars [273-275, Supplement]
• Supernova models [275-294]

Oct 31-4

Galaxies

• Galaxy types and a close look at M51 [295-307, Supplement]
• Dark matter [309-311, Supplement]
• Active galaxies [312-326]

Nov 7-11

The Local Group

• Milky Way [327-345]
• Magellanic Clouds [302-303, Supplement]
• Virgo Cluster [346-356, Partiview]

Nov 14-18

Large Scale Structure

• Distance measurements and lookback time [357-373, Supplement]
• Hubble Constant [374-388]
• Sloan Survey [Supplement]

Nov 21-25

Early Universe

• Cosmic Background Radiation [388-396]
• No class because of Thanksgiving
• No class because of Thanksgiving

Nov 28-2

Project reports and discussion

• Reports
• Reports
• Reports

Dec 5

Last day

• Second test