This page is under construction.
Keep tuned for new material.Final grades will be available through TEX in the usual way. I will not post final grades on this site. I expect to be turning in my grades early next week (week of 12/13), and the registrar will make them available over TEX soon after.
Have a nice vacation.
Star parties are held every Wednesday at 8 PM in RLM. Take the elevator to the 17th floor and follow the signs.
The Astronomy Movie Series is held monthly. The schedule is given here.
The Astronomy Department hosts viewing through the Painter Hall telescope every clear Friday evening for UT students and staff, and every clear Saturday evening for the general public, from 9:30-10:30.
Some students have complained that they can't find the most recent lectures on the web. They are there, but if you have recently accessed a page (e.g., the course home page), sometimes your browser won't fetch it but will only show the version you downloaded recently. Clicking on "refresh" does not always help. If this is giving you difficulty, here is what you can do.
If you are using Macintosh Internet Explorer, go to Edit-->Preferences-->Web Browser-->Advanced and click on the "Empty Now" button. On Macintosh Netscape, the sequence is Edit-->Preferences-->Advanced-->Cache and click on "Clear Cache Now". I do not have a PC but the sequence is probably very similar for each of these products in their PC version.
As a last resort, you should know that the URLs for the lectures are all named for the appropriate chapter in the book, e.g., Chapter.05.pdf
Therefore, if you directly request a URL by using the File-->Open Location menu item, you can type in the URL for a lecture as the following example shows:
http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/courses/ast303/pdf/Chapter.05.pdf
This should retrieve the document.
The Coop has received the activities manuals, and you should get your copy. It is OK if you arrange with a friend to share a manual (though you'll have to make copies of the assignment sheets to turn in). If you do this, be sure that you will both have access to the materials throughout the semester.
My office hours are TTh 11-12 in RLM 16.236.
TAs have office hours as follows in RLM 13.132:
This page is under construction.
Keep tuned for new material.
Help
Session for Quiz #5The help session for Quiz #5 will be held on Wednesday, December 1, from 4:30-6:30 PM in RLM 5.124.
There will be NO help session for the final. Reminder: The final will be comprehensive and will count as if it were an hour quiz. You need not take it if you are satisfied with your grade after Quiz #5. I will make every effort to post those grades before the final (by last 4 digits of SS #, outside my office).
Remember that the Optional Activity is due at the time of Quiz #5.
Order of Magnitude (DUE Sept. 8)
Kepler's Laws (DUE Friday, October 1)
Activity 1: Cross-staff, quadrant and parallax (DUE Friday, October 8)
Activity
2: The Spectrometer (DUE Friday, October 29)
Optional Activity: You can do ONE optional activity to help your grade. It can either substitute for a missed activity, or can add up to 10% to your grade.
Important Note: To view the charts, you will need to have a copy of Acrobat Reader installed on your machine. This can be downloaded free from Adobe Systems. Please follow the installation instructions on that page. In your browser, set the "helper application" for the extension .pdf (portable display format) to "Acrobat Reader." With Acrobat Reader installed, you will be able to view the lecture notes exactly as I showed them in class.
I have saved the charts as 4-up pages. This means that each page has miniature versions of four of the charts shown in class (this is an ideal size for reading, though Acrobat Reader will let you blow them up if you want to see more detail). You can print them out in advance of class and you may find them useful in saving you time copying things down. You can also save the documents on a floppy disk or your hard disk for later viewing with Acrobat Reader.
I find that the pages print
best at 95% of full size. On a Mac, use the Page Setup menu; on
PCs you'll have to figure out how to do it yourself!
Chapter 1-2: Beyond the Blue Horizon, Science and Pseudoscience
Chapter 3: Astronomical Observations
Chapter 4: Basic
Observations and Interpretations of the Sky 
IMPORTANT! Some charts were
left off the original posting of Chapter 4. Please download and
print this new copy. 9/2/99
Chapter 5: Historical Quest to Model the Solar System
Chapter 6. The Structure and Formation of the Solar System
Chapter 7. Comets, Minor Planets, and Meteorites
Chapter 9: Terrestrial Planets
Chapter 10: Jovian Planets and Pluto
Chapter 11: The Nature of Light
Chapter 13: Spectra:
The Key to Understanding the UniverseI put a new version here
on Friday! Please pick it up if you got your copy earlier.
Chapter 14: Understanding Stellar Spectra
Chapter 15: Observed Properties of Normal Stars
Chapter 16: Energy and Structure of Sun and Stars
Chapter 17: Star Formation and Evolution to the Main Sequence
Chapter 18: Stellar Evolution After the Main Sequence
Chapter 19: Cataclysmic Astronomy
Chapter 20: The Milky Way: Our Galaxy
Chapter 22: Peculiar and
Unusual Extragalactic Objects
Chapter 23: The Origin
and Evolution of the Universe
Here are some useful web pages that I've found that have to do
with astronomy.
Here is a link to the Space
Telescope Science Institute. They have lots of pictures from
the Hubble Space Telescope, and new pictures are put up there
almost every day.
The Bad Astronomer: Entertaining
site with information about bad astronomy found in various places
as well as good astronomy. The webmaster is a professional astronomer.
Need a star chart of some part of the sky? Here's a page that
will custom-make a star chart for you. You'll need a PostScript
printer to print it out. If you want to try it out, click here.
Clocks
and Time Horology contains a lot of information about clocks,
time, timekeeping, sundials, etc.
A list of links to sundial sites around the world can be found
at Sundial
Links. This site contains links to pictures of sundials, astrolabes,
nocturnals, etc., as well as to discussions of various kinds of
sundials and other useful information. For example, Bob's
Sundial Page allows you to make your own sundial; it will
create out a pattern for your latitude and longitude that you
can print out and use.
Directorate of
Time is run by the United States Naval Observatory. It has
a lot of neat things, including a page that will serve you sunrise,
sunset, moonrise and moonset times, information on atomic time,
on the LORAN, OMEGA, and GPS systems, a time server that will
connect you with the U.S. Naval Observatory's master clock and
serve you the up-to-the-second time, and a history of the U.S.
Naval Observatory's 150 years of time-keeping.
For fun, you can also look at the website Carhenge,
which is a knock-off of Stonehenge.
A more general site discussing dating of archaeological sites
by the radiocarbon method can be found at Radiocarbon
WEB-info. All aspects of the method are covered, from basic
principles through tricky questions such as calibration by tree-ring
dating (dendrochronology).
This page was served to you by Quasar, a PowerMac 7300/180.
It was last modified on 991209. This site maintained by Bill
Jefferys. My home page is located here.
All materials at this website Copyright (C) 1992-1999 by William
H. Jefferys. All Rights Reserved.