IMPORTANT Reminder!!!IMPORTANT Reminder!!!Be sure to prepare your notes sheet and bring it to the exam on Friday, May 8! It counts 10% of your grade!
You may send me an
E-mail message right now, if you have any questions or comments
about the course.
Here is a link to my Home Page. From
it you can also locate other information about astronomy on the
worldwide web. There is information about our department, about
McDonald Observatory, and links to other astronomical pages.
Please check out the following page, which contains a guide on
how to be a successful
student. I found this on the worldwide web; it's designed
for a course on agronomy, but is valid for any academic endeavor.
This page is under construction.
Keep tuned for new material.
Handouts
Assignments
Assignment
#1--Astrolabe Practice (Due February 4)
Assignment
#2--Time and Coordinates (Due February 13)
Assignment
#3--Quaternion Rotations (Due February 20)
Assignment
#4--Positional Corrections (Due March 4)
Assignment #5--Least Squares
Practice (Due March 30)
Assignment
#6--Position of a Comet 1 (Due April 8)
Assignment
#7--Position of a Comet 2 (Originally due April 17: Postponed
until April 20)
Assignment
#8--Determining a Preliminary Orbit (Due May 8)
Lectures
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. They will be named 1.pdf, 2.pdf, etc.
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!
1. Introductory Material
2. Coordinate Systems
3. Time
4. Spherical Astronomy
4.1 Quaternion Example
5. Geocentric Corrections
6. Heliocentric Corrections
7. Imaging Astrometry
8. Least Squares
9. Modern Astrometry
10. The Two Body Problem
11. The Orbit In Time
12. The Orbit in Space
13. Orbit Determination
14. Perturbation Theory
15. Double Stars
16. Stellar Motions
17. Stellar Motions
II NOTE: We probably won't get to this
TimeRC is freeware. It sets your PC clock to an atomic standard, gives dates for meteor showers and moon phase and sun angles.
AtomTime95 for the PC is similar, and supposed to be better. $5 shareware.
For the Mac, you can use Network Time, which is free and available
from Chris Johnson's Mac
Software Site at the University of Texas. Another
possibility is Vremya,
which is an application, not a control panel, and may be preferable
for some.
MoonPhase for the PC is $3 shareware, displays the Moon's current phase (see also Observing the Moon for a web page that will do the same thing).
Lunar Ephemeris is similar and runs on the Mac.
At the same site there is more software that runs on the Mac.
Click here.
Here are some useful web pages that I've found that have to do with time and astronomy.
I just found this web page on the Space Interferometry Mission. Check it out!
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website is very entertaining. It has a number of examples of mistakes and confusions about astronomy that are popular, have been seen in the press, etc.
The CDS
website contains contains lots of online catalogs.
Here's a neat website
that allows you to find your latitude and longitude on a map,
by pointing and clicking.
Joe
Heafner's Tons O' Astronomy Links contains a large number
of useful links, many of which are directly relevant to this course.
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.
Some sites that describe coordinate issues are listed here.
The University of Minnesota's Automatic
Plate Scanner site explains the difference between B1950 and
J2000 coordinates. Here is a site that describes various methods
of keeping track of spacecraft
attitude information, including rotation matrices and quaternions.
Department
of Commerce Self-Tour is a series of pages that will introduce
you to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST,
formerly the National Bureau of Standards, or NBS) and its timekeeping
services in Boulder, CO; this is where some of the atomic clocks
that are used as the world's time standards are kept. There are
pictures of atomic clocks and a sample of what the time service
WWV sounds like.
Here are some more resources on the Global Positioning System
(GPS). This is a satellite system that gives position and time,
using small, inexpensive handheld receivers. It is a wonderful
example of how modern timekeeping technology is making a whole
new range of possibilities available to everyday life. There is
an article on GPS in the February issue of Scientific American..
Here are some worldwide web pages that will tell you more about
it:
GLONASS is the Russian equivalent of GPS. There are some differences (in particular, there is no Selective Availability). MIT's Lincoln Labs maintains a web page on Glonass.
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.
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.