1. Astro 3: Solar System Astronomy
*Rick Nolthenius
*Office: 706a phone *
*visit my extremely excellent website!
*read about my background

2. They call me…. Rick

3. Textbook – “The Cosmic Perspective – The Solar System” – Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, and Voit, 5th, 6th, or 7th Edition, any are fine
I’m looking to save you money, so I don’t have the textbooks ordered by the bookstore. You can find cheap used editions on Amazon, etc.
We have a few copies on reserve in the library

4. Grading 6 mult. choice quizzes based on text. ~10 questions each
- closed notes
2 or 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.

5. 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 Cloud comets waay 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.

6. We’ll show how the sky moves differently at various latitudes

7. We’ll explain Eclipses, Seasons…

8. The formation of planets and the Solar System

9. The crazy moons around our planets.

10. Asteroids, both friendly’s and killers, and how amateur astronomers have helped define them

11. Comets: Gasy relatives of Asteroids

12. Solar System Formation

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

15. The long term evolution of our Solar System

16. And finally, the prospects and early results of the search for ET, and life in the Galaxy