Astronomy 101 A

You may download a hard copy of the syllabus here.

Course Goals

By the end of the course, I hope you will have grown in each of the following areas:

An ability to think scientifically and mathematically about both everyday ideas and physical concepts.
An awareness of how the scientific process has been used discover astronomical concepts.
A capacity to interperate a variety of astronomical observations.
An understanding of the structure and life cycle of different astronomical objects such as stars and galaxies.
A grasp of the scale of the cosmos from our Earth to the visible Universe.
A comprehension of the history and future of the Universe.
A lasting interest in astronomy.

Resources/Materials

Textbook

The required text for this course is The Cosmic Perspective, Stars, Galaxies and Cosmology, Fifth Edition, Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, and Voit., (2008) Pearson Education, Inc.
This is the abbreviated stars and galaxies version of the larger Cosmic Perspective text. The full version also contains material on the solar system and the planets, which will not be covered in this course.
If you bought a new copy of this text it should have come with a student acess kit for the mastering astronomy website. This website is a companion to the textbook, and has interactive figures, tutorials and self-quizes on the material presented in the text. If you have access to it I highly recomend you check it out. The Fourth edition of this text is virtually the same, feel free to use it.

Other Resources

You are encoraged to talk to either Jeffrey Acquino or me outside of class for answers on answers to questions you have, help on the assingments, tips for studying, or just chats on interesting astronomy. You can stop by either duing office hours or arrange a time. Our offices are located on the third floor of PAB (the physics building across from where class is held) in B329 (me) or B366 (Jeff). A map of the floor plan is available here. I understand that it is possible to be confused about a subject without having specific questions. Because of that, I will chose a topic I find interesting or confusing for each of my office hours, if no one has specific questions, I will review that topic for the hour. You are also welcome to call or email me with questions; I can promise to respond within 24 hours during the week; during the weekend it may take longer.

I will place my slides for each class following the period. These are NOT, however, a substitute for attending class. There are few captions and fewer explanetroy notes, making them fairly criptic if you missed lecture.

While the textbook is a good overview of astronomy, there is a lot of free astronomy information availible that you may want to check out. For a list of links to online references, see Resources. These are good places to look for additional explanations or further information on interesting topics we do not have time to cover more fully.

Class Materials

For class periods, you will need writing utensils, a notebook, and scratch paper. Calculators are provided in class but you will need access to one to finish the labs at home.

Student Expectations

No higher level learning takes place without thought; students are expected to engage with and think critically about the material. This will be encouraged through discussions, in-class problem solving, and group work. Students should expect to do the following class-related work:

Attend class daily
Complete the daily readings and email me questions or comments about each readings and lab
Participate in group discussions and in-class problem solving
Review a popular science article each week
Turn in labs on time
Study as necessary to keep up with what is covered in lecture
Complete each exam to the best of his or her ability

There will often be time allotted for labs in class but unfinished work is to be completed outside of class. I expect a lot of thought to be put into assignments and that they be concise and clear. I expect every member of a group to participate an equal amount in labs and in data taking, even if it requires time outside of class.

Use the resources available in this class to develop your skills as a scientist. The point of the class is to learn science - not to memorize facts to pass a test! Any student who completely fulfills these expectations should expect to pass this course.

Class Session Format

Two and hours and forty minutes is far too long to listen to a lecture, so that will not be happening. Class sessions will consist of 15 minute mini-lectures, discussion, problem solving, and a lab. Here is an outline of a typical class:

Astronomy Picture of the Day (5 minutes)
Discussion of Astronomy News OR 5 Minutes Something Interesting (5-10 minutes)
Review of Previous Lab (10 minutes)
Q&A Session (10 minutes)
A Series of Mini-lectures Separated by Problems or Discussions (45-60 minutes)
Minute Writing (5 minutes)
Break (10 minutes)
Lab (45 - 60 minutes)

Assessment and Grading

Item	Percent of Grade
Labs (14 x ~2% each)	30%
Exams
Midterm	20%
Final	20%
Readings
Textbook/Lab (13 x ~0.5% each)	8%
Science News (6 x ~1% each)	7%
Participation (~1% per day)	15%

Labs

Modern science is done using the scientific method in which hypotheses are formulated and experiments are designed to test them by gathering and analyzing data. In this class we try to recreate this process as much as possible, keeping in mind that science is an ongoing process in which the "right" answer is something that we are always approaching but never arriving at.

During this course, you will complete 14 labs, either on your own or with one or two other students.. These labs will involve various amounts of data collection, data analyzation through graphs, and mathematical interpretation. Depending on the subject covered, some labs will have a greater focus on data collection whereas other labs will be more like problem sets (aka "theory" research). These labs are designed to promote group work and to give you a first-hand experience doing science. In almost every class period, a portion of time will be reserved for group work on a lab. Many times, you will be able to finish most of the lab in the class but be sure to reserve outside time for finishing question and writing up answers.

Exams

There will be two exams: a midterm and a final. Both exams will follow the same format and will involve two kinds of questions - short answer questions on the concepts and material in homeworks, labs and lecture, and longer problems that test your skills as a scientist. For these you may be asked to design experiments, analyze data and draw conclusions, or evaluate the work of other scientists. The final exam is not comprehensive in that it is meant to test material covered in second half of the term. It may, however, draw on concepts and skills introduced in the first half. Please arrange to be in town and to set multiple alarm clocks on exam days, as I do not permit make-up exams after the fact. If there are exceptional reasons for you to miss an exam, talk to me about it before hand.

Readings

Two sets of readings are required in this course: informational readings in the forms of text books chapters and labs and exploratory readings in the form of popular science news articles.

Textbook/Lab
Students are required to read the associated textbook chapters and lab handout before arriving in class. This ensures that you have time to think about the material on your own and that class time may be spent aiding your understanding rather than imparting basic information. To assess this, I require you to send me an email before class containing TWO questions on the textbook reading and ONE question on the lab handout. For example, questions on the gravity lab could be "What is terminal velocity?" "How would our results change if we dropped a different object?" or "What would happen if we tried this on a black hole rather than the Earth?".

Your email is due at 8:00 AM each Tuesday and Thursday for which a reading was assigned and should be sent to BOTH christensen@astro.washington.edu and jta6@u.washington.edu; please include the words "READING QUESTIONS" in the subject line.

Science News
One of the goals for this course is to inspire life-long learning about astronomy. You will start this process in this course be reading a science news article every week. On each non-review day Tuesdays (six in total), a very brief (1 - 2 paragraph), typed summary along with one or two questions raised by the article is due. This is an opportunity for you to determine what astronomy gets covered in the course so we will spend some class time talking about the articles you found most interesting.

There are good sources of astronomy news on the internet, and there are very, very bad ones. To keep things "legit" please use the following sources to find your articles:

#1 Spaceref.com : a good site for astronomy news.
#2 Space.com : All the latest space news and fiction fit to post (altogether too many pop-up ads, though!).

Participation

While I can present material, I cannot make you learn and without your help, this class will not be a success. Because of this, I will be grading on participation. Most of the class will not be spent in lecture and there will be plenty of opportunities for you to participate either on a whole class scale or in groups of one or two other people. A student who receives an A in participation will do many of the following things:

Attend class
Ask questions (before, during, or after class)
Answer questions (being correct is not important)
Try to solve the in-class problems
Do his or her share of the lab work
Support his or her classmates
Attend office hours when needed
Write exceptional responses to readings and thoughtful minute papers
Share his or her opinion and ask the opinions of others during discussions

Grading

For the exams and the labs, I will look for the following criteria when grading:

Did you answer all questions posed?
Were your results communicated clearly?
Were the facts you stated in your work correct?
Where your results free of mathematical and graphial errors
Do your answers to "critical thinking" questions demonstrate that you have thought the question through clearly?
For some questions I am more interested in seeing your thought process than the answer itself.
Are your conclusions logical?
Do you demonstrate an understanding of the point of the assignment or question?

For the readings and participation, will grade primarily on effort and completion. However, exceptional work will demonstrate creativity, curiosity, an ability to make connections between concepts, and an ability to extrapolate from a general concept to a different situation.

Policies

Cheating

Cheating will not be tolerated. I encourage group work on labs in and outside of class. More specifically, you are encouraged to share raw data and discuss methods, graphs, results, and hypotheses. When you do work with other students, please give credit where credit is due and list who you worked with at the end of the lab.

However, all work you turn in must be yours - all the words, all the calculations, all the graphs, all the thinking. After discussing a problem you may reach a group consensus on the answer but the explanation you turn in must be in your own words. As a rule of thumb, if I pull you aside after class and ask you to justify something you wrote down, you must be able to do so.

If your work looks too similar to someone else's or too closely resembles something published on paper or online I will suspect cheating and investigate it fully in accordance with the university's policies on cheating.

Late Work and Missed Exams

Late work will not be accepted unless you have talked with me and been excused before the due date. If you are sick, stay home, but let us you will not be in class to turn in your work/participate in the lab. An email or phone call 5 minutes before class to say you won't be there is all that is required.