Recitation supplements for Astro1101

V. Hunter Adams (vha3@cornell.edu)

I was a TA for Astro 1101 at Cornell (instructed by Steve Squyres and Alex Hayes). These are the notes that I provided to my students each week.

Note: The students in this class are mostly first-years, many of whom are non-technical.

1. Basic math of astronomy, Kepler's Laws

2. Seasons, sidereal/solar days, Moon phases/geometry, tides, Kepler's 3rd Law

3. Gravitational/Electromagnetic forces, Wien's law, Stephan-Boltzmann, absorption/emission spectra, telescopes, Doppler

4. Parallax and parsecs; luminosity, Stephan-Boltzmann, and brightness; exoplanet transits; detecting exoplanets with Doppler

5. Half lives, dating curves, and mass spectroscopy

6. Equilibrium temperature of the Earth

7. Review of topics so far

8. Proton-proton chain, life cycle of a star

9. Venus atmosphere and geology

10. Martian surface processes, gas escape, RADAR imaging

11. Review of topics so far

12. Rings and the Roche Limit, RADAR depth sounding, the gas giants

13. Comets and Trans-Neptunian objects

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