Instructor:
Course Info and Resources
Course homepage: http://home.fnal.gov/~gnedin/teaching/ASTR181
This is going to be a non-mathematical description
of the history of mankind's discovery of our home - the Milky Way
Galaxy. We will follow the path of ancient astronomers, wonder at
their mistakes and prejudices, and form our own. On the way, we will
talk a bit about what our home is made of, what its life-cycle consists of,
and how it reached such an unsurpassed beauty...
There are (in truth) no prerequisites for this class, all pieces of
physics that we need we will figure out by ourselves.
Schedule of lectures
(my notes for each lecture will be linked on that page).
The textbook etc
- Unfortunately, there is no single source that covers this subject in full. As a main textbook, we will use a nice book by Timothy Ferris: Coming of Age in the Milky Way, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003 (it should be available at the UofC bookstore, but you can get it much cheaper on Amazon).
- For the astronomical and physical information, we will use a web-based Introductory Astronomy textbook by Dick McCray:
- http://cosmos.colorado.edu/stem/courses/common/documents/hypertext.html.
- Another useful reference is a course taught by Adam Frank at the University of Rochester. It overlaps with many (though not all) topics that we will study: http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~afrank/A105.
- In preparing my notes, I discovered that Wikipedia is a wonderful resource.
We will also use other web-based material as needed (I will keep adding links here).
Cool stuff
- Where is M13?: a freeware program to visualize location of various objects on the sky and in a 3D model of the Milky Way galaxy.
The final grade of the course will be determined according to the
following rule:
- Homeworks (4): 40%
- In-class projects (4): 40%
- Final exam (Thu, Jun 12, 1:30pm): 30%
I will let you miss one project or one homework for a valid reason.
