Astro 10: Introductory Astronomy

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Astro 10 Introductory Astronomy

• Rick Nolthenius
• Call me Rick. (Mr. Nolthenius sounds
  unappealing!)
• Office 706a 479-6506
• email rinolthe_at_cabrillo.edu
• visit my extremely excellent website!

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Textbook Pathways to Astronomy Schneider S.
and Arny T.

• 98 in the bookstore Maybe you can find used
  editions elsewhere on the web?
• One copy on reserve in the library

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Grading

• 7 mult. choice quizzes based on text.
• - 10 questions each
• - closed notes
• 2 video quizzes, after seeing 1 hr video
  program. Take notes and use them for your mult.
  choice quiz, 13 questions each
• Final Exam 50 mult. choice questions. You may
  have a single 8x10 sheet of paper crammed with
  all the notes you can muster!
• Lowest score dropped. Will drop 2 quizzes but
  ONLY if both are no-shows
• BecauseNo make-ups
• Extra Credit possibilities
• Buy 11 green narrow scantron sheets from the book
  store. 3. Cheap! Keep them in your notebook
  along with a pencil.

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New this year clickers!

• After the first 2 weeks, well have impromptu
  questions during the lectures, to monitor your
  absorptivity. Sometimes, youll have a couple
  minutes to conference with your immediate
  classmate neighbors and then click your answer.
  Some are freebies, and dont count, some do,
  and youll know which at the time given.
• Its fun! Its interactive! And itll help you
  on the regular quizzes. Cant say at this moment
  how many questions or how often well do this.
  This is new for me too.
• Some of the questions will be directly taken from
  your upcoming quiz or final.
• Attendence important for doing well, and the
  clickers will help me monitor this. Attendence
  per se will not be a factor in your final grade
  
• My current plan is - Your cumulative score on all
  questions answered with the clickers will count
  as another quiz, with the same weight (or so is
  my current plan). This is the 8th quiz as it
  were.

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What will we Do in Astro 10?

• We start with the earth and sky, how the rotating
  earth and orbiting earth make the sky show the
  patterns it does.
• Seasons, eclipses, some history.
• A session in the Cabrillo Planetarium, complete
  with spooky music!
• My own Chapter 0 on the principles of clear
  thinking and scientific method
• Then to boldly go, on to the planets and the
  stars!
• And Onward, to the Galaxy and Beyond
• To the Universe as a whole, the origin of our
  Universe, parallel universes, Inflation and the
  quantum origin, and how the existence of life
  says profound things about the nature of the
  Universe.
• Ill stress the observational facts and how we
  use scientific inference to arrive at ideas, and
  to test them to home in on our current theories
  of the Universe.
• Exams will stress getting a picture of processes
  and the why behind what we see, not much on
  memorized factoids.

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