Office: S418 Crawford, 4th floor
Office hours: MWR 3-5, T 4-5, and by appointment, but please e-mail or phone first!

Teaching assistant: T. J. Ahrens

Phone: 674-8798 Also: 674-8098 (secretary)

Office: S512 Crawford 5th floor
Office hours: F 11-1 and by appointment

Course meeting times and location: There will be two separate sections for this class, to provide more individual attention, and lower the ratio of students/telescope. I would therefore appreciate about equal numbers of students to register for both sections (about 20 apiece).

Section 1: Thursdays, 7-10 p.m. in Room S112, Crawford 1st floor

Section 2: Fridays, 7-10 p.m. in Room S412, Crawford 4th floor

Required course texts, available at the campus bookstore:

Activities in Astronomy, 4th ed., by Hoff, Kelsey, and Neff

Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook, A. P. Norton

Highly recommended text, available at the campus bookstore:

The Stars: A New Way to See Them, by H. A. Rey (The best-ever book on


constellations, even though it is a childrens' book!)

Highly recommended text, unfortunately NOT available at the campus bookstore:

Astronomical Algorithms, by Jean Meeus (on astronomical calculations).


This text is available from Sky Publishing and Amazon Books. Diskettes of C, Pascal, and Basic routines are also available. A copy is also available at the reserve desk, at Evans Library.

Observing notebooks: All students are required to have observing notebooks, available for about $1.50 apiece at the campus Bookstore. These should contain graph paper and pages that are not easily removed (not a looseleaf or spiral-bound notebook): I will show you on the first day of class precisely what I mean. All students are required to maintain logs of all observing sessions in these notebooks, separate from class notes, in a manner you find useful as a record of scientific progress. If no notebook is kept and handed in at the end of the course, the highest grade a student will receive will be a D. (Hang onto your notebook. If you go on to win a Nobel prize, it will become quite valuable!)

Note added 1999 September 3: any observing sessions on 1999 September 2 or 3 do not have to be recorded in the lab notebooks, but all other observing sessions do. If lab notebooks are unavailable in the campus bookstore for Week 2 labs, write them on loose paper (a desperation measure) and tape them into the notebooks; more should arrive either Thursday, Sep 8, or the next day.

Programmable calculators: All students are required to have some kind of portable computing device that can store and run programs the students will write in a way useful to an astronomer at the telescope.

I am requiring programmable calculators because you will be astronomers at the telescope this semester (barring an extreme streak of bad weather). I want you to program several basic utilities that astronomers use all the time while at the telescope---or just in the library, while reading a journal.

Programmable calculators, such as the TI-85 graphics calculators required in Calculus 1 class, or my own HP-28s, are fine. So would a laptop running Mathematica, although that much computing power would be unnecessary (although no doubt useful, perhaps in ways no one has imagined). I am not crazy about anything that needs to be plugged into a 115 v/60 Hz electric outlet (nor a 220v outlet). If you're not certain about your calculator, ask me.

Be sure to get and program these. Here is the assignment. The Final Exam will have problems that can be easily solved with a programmable calculator that has been properly programmed beforehand, but awfully difficult in the allowed time for any but the most exceptional pencil-and-paper mathematical prodigy. To make sure people are working on the calculator problems, there will also be two take-home mid-term exams (really heavily weighted problem sets) due October 21/22 and November 11/12.

Again, programming isn't a prerequisite for this class. I want you to learn it in this class. It shouldn't really be called programming, anyway: it's nothing more than thinking logically, and carefully following the instructions in your calculator's manual. If you don't want to do this, getting an A will be difficult.

The weather and this class: Ground-based optical astronomy is of course highly dependent on weather, so I have scheduled both Indoor Labs and Outdoor Labs. The weather in Florida can be unpredictable even an hour in advance, so it is important for the student to read and be ready to do both the indoor and the outdoor labs. The outdoor labs---real observing experience---always take priority, but if we have a great deal of bad weather, I will have to revise the following schedule. Therefore, check it every week between Tuesday and class time.

Course Schedule (updated December 8):

Course grades will be determined by the following:

Lab Book	5%
Lab Reports, including homework assignments (DUE ONE WEEK AFTER CLASS)	50%
Take-home Midterm Exam 1, mostly of programmable calculator problems, DUE: Thursday, October 21 for the section meeting on Thursdays, and Friday, October 22 for the section meeting on Fridays.	10%
Take-home Midterm Exam 2, with programmable calculator problems, DUE: Thursday, November 11 for the section meeting on Thursdays, and Friday, November 12 for the section meeting on Fridays.	10%
Final Exam: Thursday, December 16 (both Thursday and Friday sections), from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., room S112 (Crawford)	25%

PLEASE NOTE: A late penalty of -20% per day will be deducted from assignments not turned in by 7 p.m. of the specified day and by 5 p.m. of the days following.

NEW MOON occurs on September 9, October 8, and November 7, so plan ahead to make best use of dark time!

IF YOU OWN YOUR OWN TELESCOPE: You're welcome to bring it to lab, provided you let your classmates observe with it, together with you.

SPECIAL EVENTS THIS SEMESTER: Because they don't happen during class time, these can only be optional exercises. Still, I hope you'll all be able to come, at one time or another!

• You may check out equipment you can demonstrate you know how to use. See me for how to do this. Be sure to let me know (best by e-mail) what exactly you have, and return it in working condition by the next Thursday lab.
  

• Checking out equipment will be necessary if you want to do a solar lab (#4 and #24, with a special handout by me), in place of any of the Deep Sky Observing exercises.
  

• I want to do some public outreach this semester, which may include the SPS 1010 class. I'll keep you posted for dates, times, and locations.
  

• Transit of Mercury: November 15, 4:11 p.m. to 5:09 p.m.. I'll set up solar telescopes in the courtyard just north of Crawford Science Tower. I don't otherwise want to do solar observing as public outreach, though, unless I supervise it personally.
  

• Leonid meteor shower: November 16-17, midnight to dawn. I hope to observe them from the beach, or perhaps Sebastian Inlet State Recreation Area. If you get the required photographs and samples, I'll let you do both the labs Height of a Meteor (#20) and Collecting Micrometeorites (#19), in place of any of the Deep Sky Observing exercises.
  

• Remote observing with the SARA telescope on Kitt Peak:
  October 22 and November 19 and 20, 11 p.m. to very late indeed. We will observe in either the Senior Lab (S414 in Crawford), or the Image Processing Lab (S511) or T.J.'s and Nicole's office (S512), from about 11 p.m. to about 9 a.m. Look at the pictures Chris Henderson took and Isaac Silver processed of the Great Nebula in Orion (M42).

Class computing resources:

For class exercises: