ASTRO 1 -- CGS -- Spring 2002 -- Trilling

Course meets Tuesday nights, 6.30pm - 9.10pm, in DRL A7.

David E. Trilling
David Rittenhouse Laboratory
209 S. 33rd Street
Office 4N2A (north wing, fourth floor, eastern end of the hall, north side).

Office phone: 215 898 8746
Email: trilling@hep.upenn.edu
Web: http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~trilling
This course: http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~trilling/teaching/spring2002/

NEW! The finals are graded and the exams are in. Here are the final exam scores (without names, of course), and here are the final course scores. Please feel free to call/email/visit me if you would like to know how you did. Thank you all for a very enjoyable semester. I hope you got something out of it; I definitely did. Aloha, David (7 May 2002)

Archive of course announcements (News more than one week old).

Office hours: I am almost always in my office between 11am and 6pm Monday and Wednesday-Friday (and sometimes other hours outside of this). Feel free to stop by, or to arrange a specific meeting time with me. You can easily contact me by phone or email. We can also meet before or after class or regular work hours, by appointment, if this works better for you.

Textbook: Freedman and Kaufmann, UNIVERSE, Sixth edition. The book comes with a CDROM. Note that this is a new (this school year) edition, so there may not be very many used copies around. When I recently checked the Penn Bookstore, there were hundreds of copies available. The book (at least a previous edition) is also available in the Math/Physics/Astronomy library (DRL 3N1).

You do not have any particular reading assignments, only to keep up with the class material. There are things in the textbook which we will not cover in this class; it can't hurt you to read them, but you will not be responsible for them.

Additional resources provided by me: various photocopies, extra readings, science links for reference, etc.
Additional resources required by you: Web access. Also, you should bring your calculators to every class.

In class problem sets: During each class we will spend some amount of time working in small groups on small problem sets, and then discussing the problems together. These problem sets will not be collected. The goal of this is to get some practical experience with the concepts we are learning and to give you, the students, opportunities to teach and learn from each other. I have done this before and it can work extremely well. In class problem sets can be found here.

Homework: There will be eleven homework assignments given during this course, one almost every week. The homework portion of your final grade will count only the ten highest homework scores (that is, your lowest homework score will be dropped). Each homework will be assigned at the end of class and is due at the beginning of the next class. You are encouraged to discuss the homeworks with your classmates but -- in contrast with the in class problem sets -- doing your final writeup should be done by yourself: you should turn in work which is yours and yours alone. Please ask if there are any questions about this policy. Homework sets can be found here.

Semester project: There will be a required semester project. This project will give you a chance to do some ``hands-on'' astronomy, either with a telescope or with web-based images from spacecraft missions. I will discuss the semester project more in the second or third week of the semester. The semester project is due at the beginning of the semester's last class. See separate page for more information about this assignment.

Other Notes:
(1) Please turn off all cell phones before you come to class. It is incredibly rude and distracting to have cell phones ring during class.
(2) Please bring a calculator to every class. You don't need a fancy one. Mine cost $14 and does everything I need it to. If you have questions about this, please ask.
(3) Updates. I will periodically post news bulletins on this web page. Sometimes these pertain to homework questions, and sometimes to interesting science stories or results. It is probably a good idea to check the course web page (just bookmark it!) every couple of days to see if there is useful information which has been added. Last semester, I issued bulletins around once a week. I may also try email announcements too this semester.
(4) Working together is strongly encouraged in this class. The inclass problem sets are a chance to work with all of your classmates and discuss how to do problems. For homework sets, it is acceptable to discuss how to do the problems with other people, but you should write up your own answers by yourself. Copying from other students is not allowed. Copying from the textbook will not be helpful as my questions do not come from the book, and I am not asking you simple questions which can just be looked up. Under no circumstances is copying from any other source (person, book, web page) without attribution acceptable.

Grading policy: Final exam, 30%; midterm exam, 20%; homework sets, 30%; semester project, 20%.