Course Description:
The course description, credit hours, and enrollment restrictions can be found at this link.

Purpose and Learning Goals:
Students will be exposed to a broad brush of topics in astronomy with a focus on what has been learned from cutting-edge research in the past decade. Students will become familiar with the night sky, astronomical instruments/measurements, our solar system, the evolution of stars and galaxies, and the history/future of the Universe itself.

Reading:
The text for this class is "Astronomy: A Beginner's Guide to the Universe (6th Ed.)" by Chaisson & McMillan. Note that this is the short version of Astronomy Today (which you don't want) by the same authors. There is a new edition (7th) that we are not using yet this year, so you might not be able to get the 6th Edition one from the publisher. However, Amazon has the 6th Edition for $103. The ISBN number for the paperback hardcopy is ISBN-13: 978-0-321-60510-8. The bookstore should carry it as well, but I'm not sure what the price is. We'll start using the new edition next year, so keep that in mind in terms of resale (i.e., buy a used copy).

For anyone looking for more, I recommend Prather et al.'s Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy (2nd Ed.). It isn't strictly required, but it would be helpful to have. You might also be interested in Bad Astronomy by Phil Plait, but it is also not required reading for the course. Those of you that are particularly interested in learning about the night sky and constellations should buy a copy of a recent Sky & Telescope or Astronomy magazine.

Students are strongly encouraged to at least skim through the readings for each lecture before class in addition to reading the material in detail after the lecture.

Lectures:
We will meet for lecture twice a week for 1 1/2 hours. Lectures will consist primarily of information based on the readings. In-class activities (1-2 per lecture) during the lecture will be part of your participation grade (and will count 5% of your final grade). You will be allowed to miss 1 lecture in the first half of the quarter and 1 in the second half without any penalty.

Office Hours:
Tentatively set for WF 3:30-4:30pm. I may have to adjust these after the first week of classes. For those that cannot make those days/times, I can arrange for some online office hours in the evening if there is enough demand.

Homework & Quizzes:
There will be no formal, graded homeworks. However, some web-based tutorials and practice problems will help you with the weekly quizzes. The practice problems will be posted to the BlackboardLEARN page.

There will be a short (~10 minute) quiz at the start of class once each week (usually Tuesday) on the past week's material. To encourage doing the reading before lecture, one or two questions may be on new material (but can be answered by having skimmed the reading). Quizzes will be mostly multiple choice, labeling, matching, true/false, etc. Quiz questions will be drawn directly (or nearly so) from the "homework". There will be ~9 quizzes during the quarter. I will drop your lowest quiz grade; no make-up quizzes will be given, so don't be late for class on quiz days.

Exams:
Currently no midterm is planned. A (comprehensive) final exam will be given during a time/date to be decided during the exam week. It will be mostly multiple choice, T/F, etc. questions with a few short answer and drawing problems. For the multiple choice and T/F part, your score will be the average of your own score and that of your group. I'll explain more about this in class.

Grading:
10 point scale (90=A-, 80=B-, 70=C-, etc.) using the following weighting:

• 5% Class Participation (group projects during lecture)
• 5% Observing (telescope open house)
• 5% Planetarium visit (at the Franklin Institute)
• 50% Quizzes
• 35% Final Exam