Courses

This course is designed primarily for the non-physics major student who wishes to better understand the nature of the universe. Topics will be chosen from such areas as the history of astronomy, naked eye observations, the planets and moons, the origin of the solar system, stellar classification, stellar evolution, galactic astronomy, and cosmology. Course and laboratory work will explore the physical and observational background for these topics with an emphasis on the quantitative nature of modern astronomy. Two or three lectures per week; one two-hour laboratory each week. This course satisfies the quantitative reasoning general education requirement. No previous training in physics is required, however mathematical preparation is assumed to include high school algebra and trigonometry.