Astro 3: Solar System Astronomy

*Rick Nolthenius

Call me “Rick”.

*Office: 706a 479-6506

*email: rinolthe@cabrillo.edu

*visit my extremely excellent website!

They call me…. Rick

Textbook – “The Cosmic Perspective – The Solar System” – Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, and

Voit, 5th, 6th, or 7th Edition

• The bookstore has the 7th, but you can find older and much cheaper editions on Amazon, etc.

• We have a few copies on reserve in the library

Grading• 6 mult. choice quizzes based on text. ~10 questions each - closed notes• 3 video quizzes, after seeing ~50min video program. Take

notes and use them for your mult. choice quiz, a dozen or two questions each

• Final Exam: 50 mult. choice questions. You may have a single 8x10 sheet of paper crammed with all the hand-written notes you can muster!

• Lowest 2 scores are dropped. • Any further no-shows, you get 35% for each. If you miss the

final and don’t make arrangements ahead of time, you get your quiz average minus 1.5 grades, recorded as your Final exam score

• No make-ups• Extra Credit possibilities• Buy 10 green narrow scantron sheets from the book

store. $3. Cheap! Keep them in your notebook along with a pencil.

What will we Do in Astro 3?• We start with my own “Chapter 0” on the principles of clear

thinking, science, and scientific method• Then the sky, how the rotating earth and orbiting earth

make the sky show the patterns it does.• Seasons, eclipses in the planetarium, then some history.• Then to boldly go, on to the planets, comets, killer

asteroids!• And Onward, to Oort Clouds comets wayy out there, and to

other solar systems and to the question of Life in our Galaxy

• I’ll 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 solar system.

• Exams will stress getting a picture of processes and the ‘why’ behind what we see, not so much on memorized factoids.

We’ll show how the sky

moves differently at various latitudes

We’ll explain Eclipses, Seasons…

The formation of planets and the Solar System

The crazy moons around our planets.

Asteroids, both

friendly’s and killers, and how amateur

astronomers have helped define them

Comets: Gassy relatives of Asteroids

Solar System Formation and Star Formation

We’ll also have one lecture on Earth Climate. For More, Sign up for Astro 7

The long term evolution of our Solar System

The prospects and early results of the search for ET