Syllabus

This class is a general education course in everything astronomy that isn't planets! The course is split into three main sections. In the first section we'll go over some essentials of astronomy, such as a historical view of our understanding of the Solar System, what physics tells us about light that we'll be looking at from the sky, and how things move around in space. The next section is all about stars, starting with the closest to us; the Sun. We'll then move on to all the different stars out there in the cosmos, and and how they live and die. This is a big chunk of the course, including some pretty weird concepts such as black holes and neutron stars. In the final few weeks of the course we'll squeeze in whatever we can on galaxies, starting with the Milky Way and working up from there. This course isn't too tough, but I will require a little bit of math here and there, this is a science class at university after all!

Details

This class will meet three times a week over a the Fall semester. We followed the textbook Astronomy 2e by Fraknoi. It's free!

A copy of the most recent course syllabus can be found here.

Class slides

PDFs of the most recently completd semester's lecture slides can be found in the ASTR4B folder at this url.

Part A1: Introduction

Part A2: Essential astronomy

Part A3: Physics

Part A4: The night's sky

Part A5: Light

Part B1: The Sun

Part B2: Stars

Part B3: Interstellar medium

Part B4: Stellar evolution

Part B5: Stellar death

Part C1: The Milky Way

Part C2: Galaxies