INSTRUCTOR: Charles R. Cowley 857 Dennison 764-3437 Office hours:Tuesday and Thursday mornings or any afternoon; almost anytime BUT the hour before class!! Call ahead if you can.
TEXT:FUNDAMENTAL ASTRONOMY (Karttunen, Kroger, Oja, Poutanen, and Donner 4rd Ed.: Springer-Verlag). If you can find the third edition of the text, you may save a little money by using it. The changes in the 4th edition are minor, though some chapter numbers are different. More on this later.
STRUCTURE: There will be two one hour quizzes to be given on 7 October and 11 November. The order of topics this term will differ from that given in past years, so some adjustment of the following schedule may be necessary. The present plan is as follows: The first quiz will cover Chapters 1, 4, 5, 12, 8, and 3 (sections 3.1-3.3),the second Chapters 3( sections 3.4-3.7), 9, 10, 11, and 14. The Final Examination will cover Chapters 13, 16, and 17 in addition to the preceding 10 chapters; the latter chapters of the book will be emphasized. The final will be on Friday, 16 December 2005, from 4-6pm.
PROBLEMS: Problem sets will be assigned in class, typically on Mondays, and they will usually be due the following Mondays. Of the assigned problems, ONE will be graded in detail. WHICH one will be graded will not be decided upon until after the papers are collected! Complete answer sheets will be passed out when the problem sets are returned. It is your responsibility to be sure that you know how to work ALL of the problems, not just the ones that are graded. Feel free to ask questions at ANY time (other than MWF before class) about the problems.
LECTURES: The lectures will not follow the text closely, but will highlight selected topics. The first third of the lectures will cover the physics of stellar atmospheres and interiors. The second and third parts will continue with stellar composition, structure and evolution. Time permitting, we will examine some aspects of stellar nucleosynthesis within the context of the (nuclear) chemical history of our Galaxy.
COMPUTING: Some problem sets will involve programming, and running programs on the department's various computers some of which use the UNIX, Linux and Mac operating systems. You will need a basic knowledge sufficient to allow you to create and open files, write text to them, process high-level code with a compiler, and execute compiled code. Instructions will be passed out with the problem sets, telling you how to run the programs as well as how to get set up with the appropriate operating system. If you are unfamiliar with MS-DOS, the basic command language of PC's as well as WINDOWS, you should work at this too. A few of the programs written for this course are in PASCAL or C, but the majority are in FORTRAN.
GRADES: The (average of the) two hour quizzes, the final examination and the problem sets will each count roughly 1/3 of the total grade. The hour quizzes and the final examination will have two parts, one from the text, weighted 30%, and one from the lectures, weighted 70%. You will be expected to have a QUALITATIVE understanding of the material in the text; the quantitative and analytical aspects of the course will come from the lectures.
The following gives a cross reference for chapters in the 3rd and 4th editions of Karttunen et al.
There will be an online NEWS for Astron 402 available by a link on my HomePage. If you find errors or inconsistencies in the above information, or in NEWS items, please email me ASAP so I can fix them. The same request holds for information and problem sets given out during the lectures.
CRC - 6 September 2005