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General Astronomy 1 PHYS 1810

All materials on this website are copyright Jayanne English and the original producers of the images and written material. Do not use these except as study notes. Material in the ppt may be changed after the lecture, particularly in response to interactions in class.

Updated Dec 3, 2014 (has corrected versions of Lectures 8 and 12 and 32).

Powerpoint slides of lectures from 2014

1. Friday, Sept. 5
   Introduction to course and scientific method. (Revised version.)
2. Monday, Sept. 8
   Powers of Ten and Introduction to Distances.
3. Wednesday, Sept. 10
   Distance and diameters; parallax and parsec.
4. Friday, Sept. 12
   Newton's Laws of Motion and Gravity
5. Monday, Sept. 15
   Tides, Orbits, Kepler's Laws and Weighing the Sun.
6. Wednesday, Sept. 17
   General Relativity, Demos of Electromagnetic fields.
7. Friday, Sept. 19
   EM Radiation
8. Monday, Sept. 22
   EM radiation, Photons, Heat, Kirchhoff's Laws
9. Wednesday, Sept. 24
   Spectra, Radio continuum emission, HI spin flip transition, Doppler Shift
10. Friday, Sept. 26
    Telescopes.
11. Monday, Sept. 29
    Telescopes and seeing; Planets and deriving their characteristics.
12. Wednesday, Oct. 1
    Tour of the classic planets.
13. Friday, Oct. 3
    Finish Tour of the classic planets. Greenhouse Effect. Part 1 of Mars.
14. Monday, Oct. 6
    Part 2 of Mars. Overview of Solar System. Angular Momentum.
15. Wednesday, Oct. 8
    Solar System formation. Moon formation.
16. Friday, Oct. 11
    Exoplanets I.
17. Wednesday, Oct. 15
    Exoplanets II and Sun: introduction.
18. Friday, Oct. 17
    Sun
19. Monday, Oct. 20
    Luminosity, inverse square brightness law, magnitudes, photometry, spectra.
20. Friday, Oct 24 (Midterm test. Wednesday, Oct 22)
    HR diagram, distance, stellar characteristics.
21. Monday, Oct 27
    HR diagram, stellar characteristics (mass, lifetime on MS), intro to star formation.
22. Wednesday, Oct 29
    Star birth stages, Stellar evolution of 1 solar mass star (first part).
23. Friday, Oct 31
    Stellar evolution of 1 solar mass star (second part), Supernova Type Ia.
24. Monday, Nov 3
    Stellar evolution of more than 5 solar masses (second part), Supernova Type II.
25. Wednesday, Nov 5
    Black Holes.
26. Friday, Nov 7
    Black Holes continued, Sgr A*.
27. Monday, Nov 10
    Dark Matter, Hubble Galaxy Classification
28. Wednesday, Nov 12
    Galaxy characteristics, Evolution via interactions and mergers.
29. Friday, Nov 14
    Structure of the Milky Way Galaxy
30. Monday, Nov 17
    Galaxy formation and Cosmology Intro.
31. Wednesday, Nov 19
    Cosmology and Big Bang
32. Friday, Nov 21
    Cosmology and the origin of spacetime.
33. Monday Nov 24
    Cosmic Evolution (review of course), chemical evolution on Earth.
34. Wednesday Nov 26
    Chemical evolution off of Earth, Drake Equation.
35. Friday Nov 29
    Drake Equation.
36. Monday Dec 1
    Communication with technological civilizations; SETI
37. Wednesday Dec 3
    Review for test.