Astronomy 110-09

Kyle DeGrave
Office: Astronomy Building #107a
Contact Information: 646-5816, degravek [at] nmsu.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2:00 - 3:00pm, or by appointment

My office is in the Astronomy Building, just across the parking lot from our classroom. If you have astronomy questions, please drop by!

I will be teaching one section of laboratory in the fall of 2009 for Professor Anatoly Klypin. Our laboratory sections meet in the room (Biology Annex #102) where our main lectures are held.

Lab Thursdays, 3:30 - 5:30pm

If you know that you will have to miss your laboratory session one week, for a valid reason, talk to me before-hand about joining my other lab section for that week.

You need to purchase the ASTR110 lab manual before laboratory sessions begin (by September 6th). You should be able to find it at Kinkos. It costs roughly $15. You will also need to have a scientific calculator (one that can compute sines and cosines, and take square roots).

Make sure to read through each week's exercise in the lab manual before coming to lab, so that you are ready to begin. Here is a copy of our laboratory session schedule. I will add in more links to helpful demos, movies and astronomy information, throughout the course of the semester.

We will also be observing at the campus observatory (on Williams St., between Stewart St. and Wells St.) twice during the semester. You can find the schedule for open nights here, and information about whether the observatory is open on a particular night here. Be sure to bring your blank observatory notebook sheets with you, and a pen or a pencil. If you drive to the observatory, you can park in the parking lot next to the telescope domes.

I strongly recommend that you attend early each month, so that (1) you don't have to pray for clear skies at the end of the month, and (2) you don't have to wait in a long, long line to use the telescopes.

Here is a list of the labs in the order in which they will be done throughout the semester. If the order of any of the labs is changed, I will email everyone before Thursday to let them know.

Week
Lab Name
Date
1
Lab #1: Math Intro
27 August
2
Lab #3: Moon
3 September
3
Lab #5: Geology of Terrestrial Planets
10 September
4
Lab #2: Seasons
17 September
5
Lab #4: Comets
24 September
6
Lab #7: Orbit of Mercury
1 October
7
Lab #8: Parallax
8 October
8
Lab #13: Mapping the Galaxy
15 October
9
Lab #11: Sun (first observatory notebook due today)
22 October
10
Lab #10: Spectroscopy
29 October
11
Lab #12:The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram
5 November
12
Lab #14: Galaxy Morphology
12 November
13
Lab #16: Hubble's Law
19 November
14
Review (second observatory notebook due today)
3 December