The Heavens and the Earth

PHY 101: Introduction to Astronomy

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Course syllabus

What is our place in the universe? This course provides an introduction to the sciences of astronomy and cosmology. The required textbook is A Student's Guide Through the Great Physics Texts, Volume 1: The Heavens and the Earth

Topics include: identifying stars and planets in the night sky, the historical development of astronomy, celestial coordinate systems, astronomical instruments, the Copernican revolution, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton's law of gravitation, stellar parallax, galactic redshifts, Hubble’s law, and modern cosmology.

This website will lead you through Volume 1 of A Student's Guide using short videos and homework assignments. Each video has a code (in parentheses) that indicates the book volume, chapter, and lecture number. Click the link for Week 1 to get started!

PHY 101: Introduction to Astronomy meets on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 9:00 - 9:50 am.

PHY 105: Astronomy Laboratory meets in room S115 every Monday evening from 7:00 - 9:50 pm. Click here to download a free copy of the workbook we will be using for some of the labs.

Weekly Homework assignments are due on Saturday. Upload a scanned copy of your homework to the PHY 101 WLC canvass portal.

Weekly Lab Reports are due by noon on Mondays. Upload a scanned copy of the relevant pages in your observation book to the PHY 105 WLC canvass portal.

Weekly Quizzes are on (almost) every Monday during the class period.

Final exam: A comprehensive final exam will be held during finals week.

Office Hrs: TBA

Download Stellarium Software to do stargazing on your desktop or mobile device. If you have internet access, you can also use Stellarium-web Online

Subscribe to Earthsky to get daily updates of what's in the sky in the coming week.

Make printable charts of what is In the Sky at this excellent website.

Check out visibility of planets at Space.com.

Generate a sky calendar using this NASA website.

Make your own medieval astrolabe!

Looking to buy a telescope? Space.com has some good recommendations. Check out this website.

Milwaukee Clearsky Chart predicts when our city will have good weather for astronomical observing.

Logger Pro 3.15 Download for Wndows 10, 8.1, 7, and for macOS 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11, 10.10. For more details on how to download and install Logger Pro click here.

Data:
1 au = 150 million km
lunar perigee 363,300 km
lunar apogee 405,500 km