Phys 1156 Astronomy Laboratory

http://www1.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/phys1156

Spring Semester 2015

All sections are in either Derring Hall 4009 or 4029.

Welcome to the Astronomy Laboratory!

Phys 1156 is a 1-credit Astronomy Laboratory course for introductory astronomy. You will learn how to use moderate-sized telescopes to view bright objects, learn some constellations, and perform a variety of indoor lab exercises. The knowledgeable Teaching Assistants will be your guides. We hope you will find this course fun!

There are no prerequisities. You are not expected to have any previous experience using a telescope, or to have any specific knowledge of the night sky. You will learn any related background in the corequisite lecture course Phys 1056 Introduction to Astronomy.

The exercises are designed to allow you to complete the work in the laboratory meeting; you should hand in your results at the end of the lab session. There is one exception: the "independent" exercise which is designed to give you credit for attending an Open House at the Prices Fork Astronomy Observatory where you get to experience using a larger, permanently mounted astronomical telescope, the 14-Inch Telescope.

There are no exams in the course.

Instructor

John Simonetti, 319 Robeson, 231-8740, jsimonetti-AT-vt.edu
Office hours: MWF 10am-11am, or by appointment

Teaching Assistant

Your lab section will be run by a Teaching Assistant, who will introduce the course, introduce each lab, work with you during your lab meeting, grade your labs, and communicate with you during the semester, as necessary.

Materials

For outdoor exercises you will need a flashlight. You will need a calculator for nearly every exercise.

Corequisite

Phys 1056 Introduction to Astronomy is a corequisite for this course.

Astronomy Minor

This course is one of the required courses for the Astronomy Minor offered by the Physics Department at Virginia Tech.

Grades

Each exercise will be scored 10, 5, or 0 depending upon your effort and the results you produced. A full score of 10 means you put a good effort into the exercise, answered all the questions, did all the work, and obtained good results. A score of zero means you put an unacceptably minimal effort into the exercise, and obtained only a few reasonable results at most. A score of 5 lies somewhere in between. After the lab papers are graded the scores will appear on Scholar. Graded labs will be handed back at the next lab meeting.

You can accumulate a total of up to 110 points, since there are 10 regular lab meetings, plus the Prices Fork Observatory exercise. At the end of the semester your point total will determine your grade for the course. How scores translate into letters is shown here:
95 points or better = A
90 to 94.99 = A-
87 to 89.99 = B+
83 to 86.99 = B
80 to 82.99 = B-
77 to 79.99 = C+
etc.

Missing Lab, Makeup Week

A missed lab meeting results in a score of zero points for that lab exercise. There will be one make-up lab week after the 10 regular lab weeks. During the make-up week you can do one lab exercise to make up for a single missed lab during the semester. There will be no other makeup lab sessions and you cannot attend a lab on another night to make up for a missed lab meeting. For any extreme circumstances causing you to miss labs that can't be made up during the lab make-up week, you must have a written excuse for the specific lab meetings (dates) that were missed.

Late Arrivals

Lab exercises are team efforts, involving the coordinated efforts of the Teaching Assistant and the student lab partners. Students that arrive late to lab will hold everybody up. Furthermore, nobody wants to hang around in lab, at night, for more than the time required to complete a lab exercise. Therefore, nobody will be allowed to do a lab exercise if they arrive at lab later than 8:10pm. Please note that this is a severe penalty resulting in a zero for that lab.

Lab Exercise Schedule

Astronomy Laboratory is a bit different from many other lab classes --- if the sky is clear we can have an outdoor lab exercise. Thus the weather will come into play.

Here is how it will work. The first lab meeting will be indoors. At any subsequent lab meeting you might have to do an outdoor or an indoor exercise. Which exercise you will do --- outdoor or indoor --- will be determined by the Teaching Assistant at the beginning of the lab meeting. Always be prepared to be outside (i.e., dress warmly enough, it can get cold at night!).

Since the weather will probably be different from one night to the next, your particular lab section may end up doing different labs than the other sections over the course of the semester. If your section completes all the potential outdoor exercises, you will do indoor exercises even if the sky is clear (but this sort of situation rarely happens).

Independent Exercise: Visiting the Prices Fork Observatory

There is one exercise that is not done in lab --- the visit to the Prices Fork Observatory for an Open House. Open Houses take place on every Friday, weather permitting, when classes are in session. The first one for students in this course is scheduled for Friday, Sept 2.

The Prices Fork Open House webpage gives more details on the open house starting time, location, hotline phone number, etc. PLEASE NOTE: An observatory open house will only take place if the sky is not cloudy that night! You can only find out if the observatory will be open by calling the observatory hotline (231-5719) early on the evening of a scheduled open house; continue to call until you get a message that applies to that evening (don't assume the observatory is open or closed if you don't hear a message for that evening). Also, there is no guarantee that the observatory guide(s) will be there for longer than about 30 minutes after the start of an open house (sometimes the "crowd" is very thin), so get there at the starting time!

You must prepare for the visit to the observatory by printing out the Prices Fork Observatory Exercise handout. Bring that printout with you to the observatory.

Safety

The outdoor exercises will take place either in an open area near the Duck Pond, or on the deck of Derring Hall. In crossing West Campus Drive, please be careful. When on the deck of Derring Hall do not sit on the wall, place anything on the wall, or drop anything over the wall. It is always best to be in teams when doing outdoor exercises. If we follow these simple rules, no safety issues should arise.

Accommodations for Students with Disabilities

If you are a student with special needs or circumstances, if you have emergency medical information to share with me, or if you need special arrangements in case the building must be evacuated, please see me at my office hours.

Image of M51 by Adam Drake, Victor Gehman, Seth Hornstein, and Chad King (using the 0.4m Telescope, PHYS 3154, Spring semester 1999).
To Virginia Tech Physics.